A lot of the literature available concerning depression is, as I say, breezily optimistic, spreading assurances that nearly all depressive states will be stabilized or reversed if only the suitable an...
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
Such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.
Sense of the triumph of life over death is at the core of The Myth of Sisyphus with its austere message: in the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do—by the skin of our teeth...
You hate men, you’ve hated Daddy for years, and the sad thing is that he hasn’t known it. And the terrible thing is that you hate yourself so much that you just don’t hate men or Daddy but you hate ev...
Until that moment, although I’d had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not at all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold’s shoes, I wondered...
Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little... scabs, she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. I hate this type of—and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase—unearne...
The query: At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God? And the answer: Where was man?
Poland is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, soul-split country which in many ways (I came to see through Sophie’s eyes and memory that summer, and through my own eyes in later years) resembles or conjures...
Oh, I would say, you’ve never understood me, Harry, that not out of vengeance have I accomplished all my sins but because something has always been close to dying in my soul, and I’ve sinned only in o...
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Ché la diritta via era smarrita. In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right...
It was, of course, the memory of Sophie and Nathan's long-ago plunge that set loose this flood [of tears], but it was also a letting go of rage and sorrow for the many others who during these past mon...
I suddenly encountered the face of loneliness, and decided that it was a merciless and ugly face indeed.
I did not weep for the six million Jews or the two million Poles or the one million Serbs or the five million Russians -- I was unprepared to weep for all humanity -- but I did weep for these others w...
I actually shivered at the insincerity that gripped me as I spoke these words: their falseness was shameful. I was sure my coolness would return. I'd just been caught with my guard down. But at the mo...
And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one’s own life are other men, they who are so despera...
History’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.
Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink. Which will be soon, and then the dark, and then be done with this ugliness...
They had begun just lately—rumors about the Loftises, rumors about another woman, whisperings which disturbed him not so much because they concerned the Loftises—whom he didn’t know too well, in any c...
There was a time, he said softly, when I thought I’d found some kind of answer. God, we go through life fooling ourselves, thinking we’ve got the answer, only it’s never the answer really. I thought t...