14 Quotes by Affinity Konar

Work would never set us free, despite what they’d promised. But beauty? Yes, I thought, beauty might see us past the gates.

Because you had no power over the fact that I was born, you took from me what I was born with – the person who was my love, the half that made me entire – and now I am lessened into this dull thing, a divided person who will live forever, wandering in search of some nothing, some nowhere, some no-feeling, to mend my pain.

I don’t know Russian.” “I can teach you that too. It is a good language for hating Nazis in. Perhaps better than Polish. We can save Polish for other things – that would make our fathers happy, wouldn’t it?

We couldn’t imagine the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculated it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop. The.

The whole world will never look back. And if they do, they’ll probably say that it never really happened.

I love you,” I said into his shoulder. Peter stopped treading on my feet and cocked a half-closed eye at me in suspicion. “You don’t. You could – I think – in time. But you’re just saying that to me because you think you won’t have a chance to say it truthfully someday, aren’t you?” “Yes,” I confessed. “I am.

But in Auschwitz, I found that the room that really changes you is the one that can make you feel nothing at all. It is the room that says, Come sit in me, and you will know no pain; your suffering isn’t real, and your struggles? They’re only slightly more real than you are, but not by much. Save yourself, the room advises, by feeling nothing, and if you must feel something, don’t doom yourself by showing it.

It was pathetic of me to try, I know, but I had always believed in the world’s ability to right itself, just like that, with a single kindness.

The heavens I saw, they h ad never been captured, but they were haunted like I was. Did they know the details of my sister’s death? Those stars, theyknew what suffering and renewal meant, they were forged from collapse and dust and fire. That wisdom should have been enough to justify their existence, I’d think. But they insisted on being beautiful too.