Quotes About Resilience

You know, I was dealt a lot of bad hands.

The thing was, if you wanted to survive you had to keep going, Natalie had decided. Even when it hurt. Sometimes, she had discovered, you has to walk around the holes in your life, instead of falling into them.

One of them declared: 'Doing this work, one either goes crazy the first day or gets accustomed to it.' Another, though: 'Certainly I could have killed myself or got myself killed; but I wanted to survive, to avenge myself and bear witness. You mustn't think that we are monsters; we are the same as you, only much more unhappy.

For he who loses all often easily loses himself.

Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we ill have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.

Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting. by Primo Levi in Drowned

this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns.)

he) reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.

One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?

For us, on the contrary, the Lager is not a punishment; for us, no end is foreseen and the Lager is nothing but a manner of living assigned to us, without limits of time, in the bosom of the Germanic social organism.

Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.

Man's capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defence, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing and merits a serious study.

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.

Distruggere l'uomo è difficile, quasi quanto crearlo: non è stato agevole, non è stato breve, ma ci siete riusciti, tedeschi. Eccoci docili sotto i vostri sguardi: da parte nostra nulla più avete a temere: non atti di rivolta, non parole di sfida, neppure uno sguardo giudice.

E ci dicese nell'animo, nuovo per noi, il dolore antico del popolo che non ha terra, il dolore senza speranza dell'esodo ogni secolo rinnovato.

He understood before any of us that this life is war; he permitted himself no indulgences, he lost no time complaining or commiserating with himself and with others, but entered the battle from the beginning.

We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labors, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz.

Destruir l'home és difícil, gairebé tant com crear-lo: no ha estat senzill, no ha estat ràpid, però ho heu aconseguit, alemanys. Heu-nos aquí dòcils davant de les vostres mirades: per part nostra ja no heu de témer res: ni actes de revolta, ni paraules de desafiament, ni tan sols una mirada inculpatòria.

Strano, in qualche modo si ha sempre l'impressione di essere fortunati, che una qualche circostanza, magari infinitesima, ci trattenga sull'orlo della disperazione e ci conceda di vivere.

She lived with the doctor on Via Po, in a gloomy, dark apartment, barely warmed in winter by just a small Franklin stove, and she no longer threw out anything, because everything might eventually come in handy: not even the cheese rinds or the foil on chocolates, with which she made silver balls to be sent to missions to "free a little black boy.

Mu meel oli mõru; mõtlesin, et harva soostub loodus hüvitama kahju; ja sama kehtib ka inimühiskonnas, mis looduse üldskeemidest eemaldumisel on arglik ja aeglane; milline mõttelooline saavutus oleks aga jõuda nii kaugele, et loodust ei võetaks kui järgimisväärset eeskuju, vaid kui vormitut rahnu, mida tahuda, või kui vaenlast, kellele vastu hakata.

Get up": the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armor of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A

son ellos, los hundidos, los cimientos del campo; ellos, la masa anónima, continuamente renovada y siempre idéntica, de no-hombres que marchan y trabajan en silencio, apagada en ellos la llama divina, demasiado vacíos ya para sufrir verdaderamente. Se duda en llamarlos vivos: se duda en llamar muerte a su muerte, ante la que no temen porque están demasiado cansados para comprenderla.