Bertolt Brecht Quotes

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!" When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?

What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

There was something awful about terror trapped behind silence.

Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.

Nathaniel closes his eyes and jumps, his arms glued to his sides like that fly's. He doesn't try to break his fall, just hits hard, because it hurts less than everything else.

The world should have stopped, but it didn't. The world kept on going. How can the world just keep on going? An earthquake in India kills a thousand people, and the world keeps on going. A famine in China kills a million people, and the world keeps on going. The twin towers of the World Trade Center buckle and fall, and the world, the world keeps on going.

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

And the pain is too much it's too much it's too much and my hands are on my head and I'm rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that's inside me. And i fall back into it.

They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.

The rain to the wind said, You push and I'll pelt.' They so smote the garden bed That the flowers actually knelt, And lay lodged--though not dead. I know how the flowers felt.

When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

It didn’t rain for you, maybe, but it always rains for me. The sky shatters and rains shards of glass.

But silence is where victims dwell.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

The lows were absolutely horrible. It was like falling into a manhole and not being able to lift the lid and climb out.

Because all my life I've learned to suffer in silence - Athena

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

Those who suffer most cry out the least.

The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive.

Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening

I have spent my life falling. Not the kind that Tiny's talking about. He's talking about love. I'm talking about life. In my kind of falling, there's no landing. There's only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you're falling, it's the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.