Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Man prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice. I still blush every time I think of the way God mak...
Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.
It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic...
I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man's, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle's stead. I am young, he said, and stronger than he. He was y...
I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.
I looked up at my father’s face, trying to glimpse a smile or something like it on his stricken face. But there was nothing. Not the shadow of an expression. Defeat.
I am much more afraid of my good deeds that please me than of my bad deeds that repel me.
Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for thems...
Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?
And what is a friend? More than a father, more than a brother: a traveling companion, with him, you can conquer the impossible, even if you must lose it later. Friendship marks a life even more deeply...
Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
We cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly it it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the st...
They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)
There are so many who know more than I do, who understand the world better than I do. I would be truly learned, a great scholar, if only I could retain everything I've learned from those I have known....
The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria...