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I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.

Elie Wiesel

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Elie Wiesel
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 30
Died: 2016
Died: July 2
Autobiographer
Humanist
Journalist
Judaic Scholar
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Professor
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Sighetu Marmaţiei
Eliezer Wiesel
A-7713
Élie Wiesel
Auschwitz
Surprise
Inside
Actually

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Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
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No one has written the way Isaiah does. The royal style, the majesty of the language. He is called the prince of the prophets. No one has written like that. I've studied ancient literature, Homer, for example, but it's not the same thing.
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Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.
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I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.
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I have absolutely no problem with the young Germans. I even feel sorry for the young Germans because to be maybe sons or daughters of killers is different than them to be sons and daughters of the victims. And I felt sorry for them. I still do.
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The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Indifference creates evil. Hatred is evil itself. Indifference is what allows evil to be strong, what gives it power.
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And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.
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Always remember, my good friends, that there is one sin we must never commit and it is to humiliate another person or to allow another person to be humiliated in our presence without us screaming and shouting and protesting.
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Every moment contains a spark of eternity.
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There are real people behind the [Bible] stories.
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Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.
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Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain
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Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.
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The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter.
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I want to go back to the child I used to be, and to read with the same naiveté [the Pentateuch]. I want to leave science aside and go back to the pure perception offered to me in the text that is waiting there for me year after year.
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Perhaps fate isn't blind after all. Perhaps it's capable of fantasy, even compassion.
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There is no word in Hebrew for religion, by the way.
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We're alone, but we are capable of communicating to one another both our loneliness and our desire to break through it. You say, 'I'm alone.' Someone answers, 'I'm alone too.' There's a shift in the scale of power. A bridge is thrown between the two abysses.
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You’re shaking … so am I. It’s because of Jerusalem, isn’t it? One doesn’t go to Jerusalem, one returns to it. That’s one of its mysteries.
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No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
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