Elie Wiesel - Night (1956)

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The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it.

Elie Wiesel
How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?

Elie Wiesel
We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.

Elie Wiesel
Bite your lips, little brother...Don't cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later. The day will come but not now...Wait. Clench your teeth and wait...

Elie Wiesel
We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.

Elie Wiesel
I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.

Elie Wiesel
Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?

Elie Wiesel
One more stab to the heart, one more reason to hate. One less reason to live.

Elie Wiesel
Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.

Elie Wiesel
There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It's like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: it's raining today and it's going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century.

Elie Wiesel
We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything—death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.

Elie Wiesel
It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.

Elie Wiesel
They called him Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname.

Elie Wiesel
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

Elie Wiesel
Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.

Elie Wiesel
Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.

Elie Wiesel
Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

Elie Wiesel
Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now, the last night in Buna. How much longer were our lives to be dragged out from one 'last night' to another?

Elie Wiesel
I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man.

Elie Wiesel
Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible.

Elie Wiesel
Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.

Elie Wiesel
Man asks and God replies but we don't understand his replies because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die.

Elie Wiesel
The yellow star?
Oh well, what of it?
You don't die of it.

Elie Wiesel
He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming out base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if he punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more...

Elie Wiesel
I did not weep, and it pained me that i could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like--free at last!

Elie Wiesel
One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.

Elie Wiesel
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Elie Wiesel
Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

Elie Wiesel
I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.

Elie Wiesel
They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)

Elie Wiesel