I understood everyone was walking around with secrets and broken bones and hurtful words that could not be washed away with soap.

My mother was a cup of sugar. You could borrow her anytime.

I try to understand, how was it possible to survive amid this endless experience of dying?

Each time the truth is unbearable.

They died in the basements of the Gestapo, and their courage was known only to the walls. And now, forty years later, I mentally kneel to them.

In war everything happens more quickly: both life and death. In those few years we lived a whole life.

Suffering is a special kind of knowledge.

Love is the only personal event in wartime. All the rest is common - even death.

For me one human being is so much. There is everything in him - you can get lost.

The past disappeared, it blinded her with its scorching whirl and vanished, but the human being remained. Remained in the midst of ordinary life. Everything around is ordinary except her memory.

It's terrible to remember, but it's far more terrible not to remember.

You ask me: what is happiness? I answer...To suddenly find a living man among the dead.

We look at the past from today; we cannot look at it from anywhere else.

I build temples out of our feelings. Out of our desires, our disappointments. Dreams. Out of which was, but might slip away.

Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life. For us pain is art.

Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they write their life. Sometimes they also write up or rewrite.

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it.

I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely belived this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn't affect me, that he didn't affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn't understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that it not affecting me, that was its effect.

Det er ikke riktig. At det skal være så lett for andre og så vanskelig for meg, jeg skjønner ikke hva det er, om det er en formel, en kode de andre kan, som de har kunnet siden de var små og som jeg ikke har fått med meg.