I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world... I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.

Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.

My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.