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262 results · Page 6 of 11Play this collection ▷
07Undated
For a long time, she sat and saw.She had seen her brother die with one eye open, on still in a dream. She had said goodbye to her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A woman of wire had laid herself down, her scream traveling the street, till it fell sideways like a rolling coin starved of momentum. A young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow. She had watched a bomber pilot die in a metal case. She had seen a Jewish man who had twice given her the most beautiful pages of her life marched to a concentration camp. And at the center of all of it, she saw the Fuhrer shouting his words and passing them around.Those images were the world, and it stewed in her as she sat with the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words.
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08Undated
I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what couldI tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.None of those things, however, came out of my mouth.All I was able to do was turn to Liesel Meminger and tell her the only truth I truly know. I said it to the book thief and I say it now to you.I am haunted by humans.
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11Undated
Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, an in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me. Even in the night, in bed, they woke me.They painted themselves onto the ceiling.They burned themselves onto the sheets of memory laid out in my mind.When I woke up the next day, I wrote the words down , on a torn-up piece of paper. And to me, the world changed color that morning.
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