Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

The hard part is, of course, the proximity of death. The number has no meaning as long as you're fit and healthy. But you know that you only have so much time left and you don't know how much it is. It could be a very short time.

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.

Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.

You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.