Yair’s Reviews > Dialogue with Death > Status Update

There is nothing in the tenets of even the gloomiest monastic order which condemns a man to endure purgatory, and then, when it is all over, sends him back to hell.

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death (p. 201). Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

Six days shalt thou labour, saith the Lord, and on the seventh day, the Sabbath, thou shalt do no manner of work. On Sunday night three were shot.

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death (p. 176). Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

That is why they shot you: because you had the impudence to wish to learn to read. You and a few million like you, who seized your old firearms to defend the new order which might perhaps some day have taught you to read.

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death (p. 164). Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

I should like to know whether he hanged himself because, at the moment when he knotted the rope, he happened to be mad or because he happened to be sane. The outside world becomes more and more unreal to me.

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death (p. 150). Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

And I blessed the wisdom of the Lord, who has so ordered the world that the day has only twenty-four hours and not twenty-five or thirty.

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death (p. 110). Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

What I did not know was that the court-martial in Malaga had already pronounced sentence of death on me without my being summoned before it.

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death (p. 80). Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

Nothing doing without alcohol. The pressure of outward events has to be balanced by a certain inward pressure; the brain remains lucid but stark reality is agreeably blunted. And one no longer minds.

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death (p. 21). Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

“A life is worth nothing—
but nothing is worth a life .  .  .”

Koestler, Arthur. Dialogue with Death (p. 1). Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.