Della

“Alas for the dreamer : the moment of consciousness that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of sufferings. But it does not often happen to us, and they are not long dreams. We are only tired beasts.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“3 August, Yorkshire. I know so little that writing is like crossing a patch of swampy ground, jumping from one tussock to another trying not to get my feet wet (or egg on my face). Of course at a distance no one can see the ground is swampy, and at a distance too one's movements are smoothed out, the hesitations diminished. Fifty years on, the anguished leaps may seem like confident strides. Except who will be looking?”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“Bitterness rots the vessel that carries it.”
― Lemn Sissay, My Name Is Why

“Like a stone the foreign word falls to the bottom of every soul. 'Get up' : the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armour of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A day begins like every day, so long as not to allow us reasonably to conceive its end, so much cold, so much hunger, so much exhaustion separate us from it : so that it is better to concentrate one's attention and desires on the block of grey bread, which is small but which will certainly be ours in an hour, and which for five minutes, until we have devoured it, will form everything that the law of the place allows us to possess.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz