Aron

“For those awaiting death as we were, passive and apathetic, on the verge of collapse, ready to hit bottom, it only takes one flash of light in the darkness, one lucky break, and suddenly you rise up again and return to the living. What you leave behind, however, is an empty territory that you cannot even describe: it has no points of reference or shapes or signposts, and its existence—like the sound barrier—is something you feel only once you have approached it. One step of that emptiness and it disappears. No one, however, who has entered this emptiness can ever be the same person he was before. Something remains—a psychological scar, hardened, gangrened flesh—a fact finally more apparent to others than to himself, that something has burned out, that something is missing. You pay for every meeting with death.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, The Soccer War

“Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination.”
― Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean

“Leb, waiss nit wie lang,
Und stürb, waiss nit wann
Muess fahren, waiss nit wohin
Mich wundert, das ich so frelich bin.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“The patience of the oppressed has always been the most inexplicable, as well as probably the most important, fact in all of history.”
― Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933