Quotes from Elie Wiesel

He who doesn't forget God isn't cold in his grave," she said. "What keeps him warm?" I insisted. Her thin voice had become like a whisper: it was a secret. "God himself.

It's a laugh that comes from beyond happiness and sadness. From beyond faith and anger. It's a laugh that only the dead can appreciate.

Men to the left! Women to the right! Eight words spokern quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother.

Men are wrong to think that the blind cannot see. The truth is that they see, but differently. I would even say that they see something other.

The word "chimney" here was not an abstraction; it floated in the air, mingled with the smoke. It was, perhaps, the only word that had a real meaning in this place.

Stripped of their property, crushed and mutilated, they still embody the nobility of Israel and the eternity of God, while their enemy—who is your enemy as well—embodies all that is most vile in man. I shall act not as their detractor, but as their melitz yosher, their intercessor.

And what do you take care of? What people throw away, what history rejects, what memory denies. The smile of a starving child, the years of its dying mother, the silent prayers of the condemned man and the cries of his friend: I gather them up and preserve them. In this city, i am memory.

We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was not in danger of death?

He spoke only of what he had seen. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad.

I am not so naïve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.

Jews, listen to me,' she cried. I see a fire! I see flames, huge flames.

Suffering is given to the living, not to the dead," he said looking right through me. "It is man's duty to make it cease, not to increase it. One hour of suffering less is already a victory over fate.