Sarah

“Listening to the man’s story, Jim felt he’d been granted a privilege. This was intimate contact with life, the very thing he had missed during all those years of reading philosophy.”
― Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers

“I mentioned earlier how everything that was not connected with the immediate task of keeping oneself and one’s closest friends alive lost its value. Everything was sacrificed to this end. A man’s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt. Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first—to the last ounce of his physical resources)—under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life. The men were herded—sometimes to one place then to another; sometimes driven together, then apart—like a flock of sheep without a thought or a will of their own. A small but dangerous pack watched them from all sides, well versed in methods of torture and sadism. They drove the herd incessantly, backwards and forwards, with shouts, kicks and blows. And we, the sheep, thought of two things only—how to evade the bad dogs and how to get a little food.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“rare psychiatric malady that actually defines the idea—Cotard’s delusion, the belief that one is already dead, or doesn’t exist, or is putrefying, or has lost one’s blood and inner organs.”
― Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers

“He lives by what he calls the Homeless Credo: “Do what you have to do today. Tomorrow will come. And if it doesn’t, you won’t have to deal with it.”
― Jennifer Toth, The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City