In a quiet Franciscan monastery kind and silent monks looked after me. After many weeks I was discharged. Unfit for further service.

We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity.

I was at the front for thirteen months, and by the end of that time the sharpest perceptions had become dulled, the greatest words mean.

Soldiers and peasants lived together on friendly terms; they knew each other and their everyday routines, and trusted each other; they shook their heads together over the war.

The working class will not halt until socialism has been realized.

The revolution is like a vessel filled with the pulsating heartbeat of millions of working people.

Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.

I saw the dead without really seeing them.

As a rule, people are afraid of truth. Each truth we discover in nature or social life, destroys the crutches on which we need to lean.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.", Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

...there are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.

Some poems are written great, some poems are written swell. But then there are poems that could win a prize in Hell.

We only have one life to live, and must go on with it to the end, that if we feel it is meaningless, then we ourselves must give it meaning.

So many questions. Could she not think about what the answers might be before asking?

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

We will never have peace without friendship around the world.

You didn't quit skateboarding because you got old, you got old because you quit skateboarding.

History teaches us the mistakes we are going to make.

Rumour was the messenger Of defamation, and so swift, that none Could be the first to tell an evil tale.