Grace RS

“Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?" and in those heart-rending words he heard others: "I am your brother.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat

“But I was not crying for anything in that house. I was crying for the innocence of that father walking home through the blushing Amsterdam evening, for the hope of that woman scrubbing a new flat for a new life, for the boy who thought he was safe. I was crying for a world that saw a war coming, that feared the worst, but had no inkling how bad the worst could be. I was crying for a world that, for all its misery, had not heard of concentration camps, or mass showers that spray death, or chimneys that spew human ashes, or medical experiments on men who happen to have red hair or children who happen to be twins. I was crying for a paradise I had tried to recreate for my wife and children, and myself, and for my failure. I cried for the second murder of my parents, the one I had committed by silence.”
― Ellen Feldman, The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank

“How little humane feeling after all was to be found in men's hearts; how much coarseness and cruelty was to be found even in the educated and those who were everywhere regarded as good and honorable men.”
― GOGOL, The Overcoat

“In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves…His house was so like the others that it would never have been noticed.”
― Leo Tolstoy