If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.

Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?

If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you.

Some people speak and sing and walk and sit and sleep and silence their homesickness, for a long time, and to no avail. Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it’s no longer focused on a concrete home. I am one of the people who say that.

Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?

Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity".

I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.