Paul Celan Quotes

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

Even in that time of utter darkness, somewhere deep inside me the memory of love and goodness had stayed alive.

But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you ... more proud.

Some people never see the light Till it shines thru bullet holes.

But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.

Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.

Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.

When all else is lost, the future still remains.

If you're actually talking to someone who's been through a disastrous number of years, that only means one thing: They survived it.

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.

I've been through it all, baby, I'm mother courage.

And if you don't believe the sun will rise, stand alone and greet the coming night in the last remaining light.

It's what the Iraqi people are going through right now. They have encountered a victorious, hostile force-but, you know, there they still are. There their culture is, there their history is, they're not going anywhere.

I can't believe I survived, not only my life, but I am still playing football 'cause half of those eight or nine years I don't even remember.

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

Heart's always been sort of like a cockroach. You can set off a bomb, and it'll still be alive underneath.

My mother is a very strong woman. We were seven kids; five of them passed away. My elder brother and I are alive. My mother lost five kids, her husband, her parents and siblings. But she is so strong, she is living for the people who are alive.

The only thing I know how to do is survive.

Grace. I held on to that name. If I kept that in my head, I would be OK. Grace. I was shaking, shaking; my skin peeling away. Grace. My bones squeezed, pinched, pressed against my muscles. Grace. Her eyes held me even after I stopped feeling her fingers gripping my arms. Sam," she said. "Don't go.

How many times can a man go down and still be alive?

And I saw darkness for weeks. It never dawned on me that I could come out of it, but you heal. Nature heals you, and you do come out of it. All of a sudden I saw a crack of light ... then all of a sudden I saw another crack of light. Then I saw forms in the light. And I recognized that there was no darkness, that in darkness there'll always be light.

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization taht the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.

After so many deaths I live and write.