“I'm so sorry. I love you. I never could have hurt you.”
― Pam Jenoff, quote from The Kommandant's Girl
“Anna is something wrong " he asked his brow furrowed.
Yes I want to say. You ran a prison camp for Jews. You keep my parents locked in the ghetto. You let your wife's father be killed and would kill Jacob too if given the chance. Your wretched Gestapo came to our house and now Lukasz might have to leave us. Let me count the ways. Of course I did not dare to say any of this. "No Herr Kommandant " I replied managing to keep my voice even. "Everything is fine.”
― Pam Jenoff, quote from The Kommandant's Girl
“he says at last, bidding me good evening as though it were”
― Pam Jenoff, quote from The Kommandant's Girl
“empty, what was to stop vagrants, or even”
― Pam Jenoff, quote from The Kommandant's Girl
“governor’s office,” Diedrichson says solemnly without”
― Pam Jenoff, quote from The Kommandant's Girl
“I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
“When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Here on Earth
“Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn?
Mystery!
Because of all that cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved—absolutely and purely—that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone? That Judge Crater fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing would tantalize.
The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It’s a standoff.
The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. And so I lose sleep over mute facts and frayed ends and missing witnesses.
God knows I’ve tried.
Reams of data, miles of magnetic tape, but none of it satisfies even my own primitive appetite for answers. So I toss and turn. I eat pints of ice cream at two in the morning.
Would it help to announce the problem early on? To plead for understanding? To argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human ignorance? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation?
I prowl and smoke cigarettes.
I review my notes.
The truth is at once simple and baffling: John Wade was a pro. He did his magic, then walked away. Everything else is conjecture. No answers, yet mystery itself carries me on.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from In the Lake of the Woods
“I hum some secret place into being, thinking of this other me, the one that only I can see, a girl called She, who is not We, a girl who I will never be.”
― Lori Lansens, quote from The Girls
“No doubt the detour to deliver Lake had made the sheep late for an appointment.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from City of Saints and Madmen
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