Holocaust Literature Quotes & Sayings

Become willing to see the hand of God and accept it as a friend's offer to help you with what you are doing. — Julia Cameron

We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last - the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die. — Primo Levi

People always snap and think they're Jesus. How come no one ever snaps and thinks they're Buddha? — Bill Hicks

But Anja. I hear Anja's voice. Maybe I am insane. I hear her crying. I see her alone in the trees. I remember being alone and humiliated. I remember, too, the fat little boy hiding in the bathroom. And I see this man, Ariane. I see this evil man, Ariane. He laughs everyday still. He has had years of laughter. He has triumphed over the screams of others, he has triumphed with blood on his hands. And he laughs still. God has cursed us! He has either cursed us or He was never here to begin with. We've pretended God was here for our own sanity! That's the truth! We've pretended evil is punished and good is rewarded. A perfect scheme! — Sergio Troncoso

He found the cone and bit into it. "I'm not an errand boy." No, he wasn't. He was a fool, which made him even lower on the pole. — Steve Berry

He told me that what he owned and accumulated didn't matter. He still had his family. We still had our future. Go forward, You can't look back. It will destroy you if you do... Ever since that day, I have seen the world through a different prism. — Ralph Webster

Let's put it this way. I question whether 6 million Jews actually died in Nazi death camps. There are two major sources for Holocaust stories. One is the Nuremburg war-crimes trial, which has been shown by all honest historians to be a farce of justice. Another source is the great body of literature and media work, and at least 90% of that material is from biased Jewish sources. — David Duke

This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. — Primo Levi

Destruction doesn't create a vacuum, it simply transforms presence into absence. — Anne Michaels

In general, in America, every discourse in literature in 15 minutes degenerates into a conversation about ethics, morality and this and that. The Holocaust and the consequences of it. Well, I find it terribly boring, predictable and unimportant, because what matters about literature is esthetic achievement. — Joseph Brodsky

Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds- pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this under a magnificent blue sky. — Elie Wiesel

The opposite of love is fear, not hate. — Yoko Ono

It was a place nobody wanted to stay and look at, but almost everyone did. Shaped like a long, broken arm, the road contained several houses with lacerated windows and bruised walls. The Star of David was painted on their doors. Those houses were almost like lepers. At the very least, they were infected sores on the injured German terrain. — Markus Zusak

Nothing about these times makes any sense. Nothing. Putting it to words only makes it sound too simple. — Ralph Webster

Healing can be a long and winding road or a straightforward march to the finish line. — Alice McCall

I grew up reading Holocaust literature at the beach, Gulag literature on winter holidays, Vietnam memoirs on spring break. — Michael Hastings

Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. — Alan Moore

The tombstones smashed in Hebrew cemeteries and plundered for Polish sidewalks; today bored citizens, staring at their feet while waiting for a bus, can still read the inscriptions. — Anne Michaels

I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal. — Ralph Webster

If we take the capsulation of minorities within the nation-state as a given condition, the implication of the Holocaust is that the life and liberties of minorities depend primarily upon whether the dominant group includes them within its universe of obligation; these are the bonds that hold or the bonds that break. — Helen Fein

This is the second Old Master I have encountered that has the signatures of another artist forged over it. A painting that has been created by another artist entirely. It's like they played mix and match. — Dayna S. Rubin

We did not speak of what we had seen. At the time, to speak of it seemed worse than sacrilege: We had witnessed a thing so terrible that it acquired a dreadful holiness. It was a miracle of evil. It was not possible to say with words what we had witnessed, and so we kept it safely guarded until the time we could bring it out, and show it to others, and say, 'Behold. This is the worst thing man can do'. — Irene Gut Opdyke

I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us. — Ralph Webster

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people — Heinrich Heine

The kindest thing you can offer an author is a review and a star rating. So appreciated.
THE GOLDEN PEACOCK has had a successful 5-star run on Goodreads and on Amazon. Thank you!" Lauren B. Grossman — Lauren B. Grossman

When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass. — Anne Michaels