In my fantasies, I was always caught up in heroic struggles, and I saw myself saving lives, sacrificing myself for others. I had far loftier ambitions than mere romance.
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I wanted something that would address the strengths and weaknesses of humanity. I wanted a story that could move readers. My Honor Flight is that story.
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There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.
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Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.
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Potkraj Drugoga svjetskog rata izvukli su me iz škole i, kao šesnaestogodišnjaka, gurnuli u vojsku. Nakon kratke vojni?ke izobrazbe u würzburškim kasarnama došao sam na frontu koja se u to vrijeme ve? Bila pomakla preko Rajne u Njema?ku.?eta je bila sastavljena iz samih mladih ljudi, bilo nas je preko stotinu. Jedne ve?eri komandir?ete poslao me prenijeti jednu poruku u komandu bataljona. No?u sam lutao razorenim selima i majurima, a kad sam se pred jutro našao na mjestu gdje sam ostavio svoju?etu, našao sam još samo mrtvace: ?etu je pregazio kombinirani napad lovaca-bombardera i tenkova. Svima njima, s kojima sam još dan ranije dijelio dje?je tjeskobe i mladena?ki smijeh, sada sam mogao gledati još samo ugasli mrtvi obraz. Ne sje?am se ni?ega doli jednog krika bez glasa. I danas još vidim samoga sebe tako, a iza spomena na to raspali su se snovi mojega djetinjstva.
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As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed until suddenly he realized his folly.
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I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything - fortune, love, even a limb - if I could simply survive.
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I don't want to hope for anything anymore. I don't want to pray that Max is alive and safe. Or Alex Steiner. Because the world did not deserve them.
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In seven days God had created the Earth. In a single day mankind had turned it upside down.
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This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' narrative): both wars were about the country's survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th.. Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.
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?I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.
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That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.
In the end the war was Hitler's war. It was not perhaps the war he wanted. But it was the war he was prepared to risk if he had to. Nothing could deter him.. He was no longer prepared to wait on events. He needed to force them to manipulate them to manufacture incidents to create pretexts for action.
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In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing conservatism but a form of deception resembling lunacy.
There began to appear before my romantic eyes..a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.
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I would sum up the German character best by saying that they are the best of losers and the worst of winners.
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It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.
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Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?
It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.
She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting.
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The only difference between a grown-up's mistake and a child's is the size of the consequence.
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The tears are falling freely now, and I don't care if he sees them. They're tears of relief for my nephew, worry for my grandfather and my brother, and shame for my mistake. I figure I earned them.
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The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn't have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.
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SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night. Accurate scholarship canUnearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until nowThat has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago madeA psychopathic god: I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral airWhere blind skyscrapers useTheir full height to proclaimThe strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vainCompetitive excuse: But who can live for longIn an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's faceAnd the international wrong. Faces along the barCling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspireTo make this fort assumeThe furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trashImportant Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wroteAbout DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the boneOf each woman and each manCraves what it cannot have, Not universal loveBut to be loved alone. From the conservative darkInto the ethical lifeThe dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife,I'll concentrate more on my work,'And helpless governors wakeTo resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb?All I have is a voiceTo undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brainOf the sensual man-in-the-streetAnd the lie of AuthorityWhose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the StateAnd no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the nightOur world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages: May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
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The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.
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