Elie Wiesel Quotes

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

Sharing our depressions felt like having survived a war. The experience bonds you to the other person for life.

Tom gets by, Navidson succeeds. Tom just wants to be, Navidson must become. And yet despite such obvious differences, anyone who looks past Tom's wide grin and considers his eyes will find surprisingly deep pools of sorrow. Which is how we know they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson's eyes share the same water.

I was just working in the shop and all of a sudden something just triggered in me, and I started shaking. And then I walked back into the house and my wife asked, 'What's the matter?' And I said, 'I don't feel good.' And tears, uncontrollable tears, was coming out of my eyes and she says, 'What's the matter?' And I told her. I said, 'I just thought about that execution that I did two days ago, and everybody else's that I was involved in.' And what it was, something triggered within, and it just, everybody - all of these executions all sprung forward.

The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.

Sam,' the girl said. 'Sam.' She was the past present and future. I wanted to answer , but I was broken.

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

The hearts of all men dwell in the same wilderness.

There's the life you live and the life you leave behind. but what you share with someone else - especially someone you love - that's not just how you bury your past. It's how you write you future.

Aureliano not only understood by then, he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own, for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake.

I penetrate the hearts of good kids and criminals

There are robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer.

I tried to commit suicide because I sacrificed everything for Hitler. And that man whom we sacrificed everything for left us all alone. If he had committed suicide four years before, it would have been all right.

The trauma of the whole thing has been humbling, and for the first time, I'm a little bit wobbly.

When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is really there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the world in quite the same way again.

Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.

Ghosts don't haunt people--their memories do.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

I just like the fact I can make a film which might give comfort to some people who think they are the only crazy person in the world and suddenly they see there are two crazy people in the world.

But I'm not here just to make records and money. I'm here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: "Do you know this feeling?

According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.

It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

Your past is your shadow. It has form but no substance, except in the places you allow it to touch you. (