The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.

Still, everybody wants to eat.

Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

The term "national idea" is an unclear one. One might think of it as a widely shared understanding among a people as to the desired way of life in their country, an idea that holds sway over the population. A unifying concept like that can be useful, but should never be created artificially or imposed top-down by the powers-that-be.

Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it, holds terrors.

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.