26 quotes
It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work.
Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz.
Sophie's Choice (1979)
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.
Writers at Work (1958)
Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true!
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
Even today, many otherwise well-informed people have never heard the name Nat Turner.
This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)
Numberless factors shape one's needs and longings.
This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)
It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Darkness Visible (1990)
I shivered in the knowledge of the futility of all ambition.
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)
One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
Darkness Visible (1990)
I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent.
Darkness Visible (1990)
’Neath cold sand I dreamed of death
but woke at dawn to see
in glory, the bright, the morning star.
This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
Sophie's Choice (1979)
He informed me that one could not become a writer without a great deal of reading. To write one must read, he repeated, read . . .
This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)
Her thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. "I can't choose! I can't choose!"
Sophie's Choice (1979)
My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
Camus's great essay "Reflections on the Guillotine" was alone almost enough - in its persuasive logic and eloquence - to make me an enemy of capital punishment.
This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)
This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
Sophie's Choice (1979)
The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.
The query: “At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?”
And the answer: “Where was man?”
Sophie's Choice (1979)
When I was a young writer there had been a stage where Camus, almost more than any other contemporary literary figure, radically set the tone for my own view of life and history.
Darkness Visible (1990)