The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.

Work, love, courage and hope,Make me good and help me cope!

Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.

Ruth wiped her eyes. Successful at a price? Forgiven but damaged? She wished so much more for her baby sister.

I wanted something that would address the strengths and weaknesses of humanity. I wanted a story that could move readers. My Honor Flight is that story.

Of course the people in the metro didn’t see a thing!…what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they’ll still come out to refute me! make claims!…that nothing got bombed!…squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and...

The only difference between a grown-up’s mistake and a child’s is the size of the consequence.

In the end the war was Hitler’s war. It was not perhaps the war he wanted. But it was the war he was prepared to risk if he had to. Nothing could deter him…He was...

While stationed in Fort Jackson, I experienced racial prejudice for the first time and came to the understanding that humans are not born with prejudice, but learn prejudice. Back home in South Dakota, I only...

The art of living. Isn’t that a funny expression?

As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed...

Brick walls towered over her. Decrepit staircases crowded about her. Nothing had changed. The line there, the lessons there, the rape there. Shouldn’t the place be crimson with blood and black with shame?

Queenie, herself again, took hold of Maddie’s hand and squeezed it tightly. She walked all the way back across the airfield without letting it go. Maddie closed her eyes and flew again in the ethereal...

Finally, I wish to remember the millions of Allied servicemen and prisoners of war who lived the story of the Second World War. Many of these men never came home; many others returned bearing emotional...

The tears are falling freely now, and I don’t care if he sees them. They’re tears of relief for my nephew, worry for my grandfather and my brother, and shame for my mistake. I figure...

The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders … I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those...

To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went...

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us...

War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.

So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience—the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and...

Look at me!’ I screeched. ‘Look at me, Amadeus von Linden, you sadistic hypocrite, and watch this time! You’re not questioning me now, this isn’t your work, I’m not an enemy agent spewing wireless code!...

We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in...

One day this war will end. And when it does, Tule Lake will be just a memory.

Superior insight into history used to be exhilarating for radicals: if we can see more clearly than the Enemy what is really going on, then we can use this knowledge to advance our values. But...

In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing...

Until the War, we claimed to be equal; simpletons, some say, but equal man to man.

Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private...

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can’t feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the...

right side” of the war, ever heard—let alone answered?

It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.

There began to appear before my romantic eyes…a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.

Potkraj Drugoga svjetskog rata izvukli su me iz škole i, kao šesnaestogodišnjaka, gurnuli u vojsku. Nakon kratke vojničke izobrazbe u würzburškim kasarnama došao sam na frontu koja se u to vrijeme već bila pomakla preko...

Ah, my dear friend, cheer up… After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can’t behave so abominably anymore. All right, we’re not free. But we are used to that, Mr....

No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.

Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into...

We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when...

The line between him and the enemy had simultaneously blurred and solidified. Somehow, while perhaps it shouldn’t have, this thought provided a strange sense of peace.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die – anything to stop remembering.

In my fantasies, I was always caught up in heroic struggles, and I saw myself saving lives, sacrificing myself for others. I had far loftier ambitions than mere romance.

Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in...

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of...

Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after...

In seven days God had created the Earth. In a single day mankind had turned it upside down.

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she...

Roy

if something does go wrong, here is my advice… KEEP CALM and CARRY ON.

‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn’t greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize...

What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is...