Rithy Panh Quotes

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

I have been drawn to stories that are attempting to turn suffering into beauty.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.

Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

Given the scale of trauma caused by the genocide, Rwanda has indicated that however thin the hope of a community can be, a hero always emerges. Although no one can dare claim that it is now a perfect state, and that no more work is needed, Rwanda has risen from the ashes as a model or truth and reconciliation.

The Holocaust remains unique in contemporary Jewish consciousness for its capacity to engender the most visceral grief and abject pain.

Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

My grandfather died when I was 14, and he was in Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. So be grateful for your life because nothing is guaranteed. Everything could literally be taken away from you tomorrow.

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.

There is no answer to Auschwitz...To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair, to sense a ray of God's radiance in the jungles of history.

At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.

Art is the highest form of hope.

I remember those faces of people who were good I saw that. I saw a father who gave his bread to his son and his son gave back the bread to his father. That, to me, was such a defeat of the enemies, will of the enemies, theories of the enemies, aspirations, here [in Auschwitz].

If people can live through genocide and retain compassion, if they can take strength in pain, if they are able, still, to laugh, then certainly we can learn something from them.

Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.

The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz.

In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.