Jonathan Littell Quotes

If you ever managed to make me cry, my tears would sear your face.

I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come.

I have remained someone who believes that the only things indispensable to human life are air, food, drink and excretion, and the search for truth. The rest is optional.

If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you're not a better person.

Schellenberg had the habit of calling people he didn't like whores, and this term suited him well - and when I think about it, it's true that the insults people prefer, the ones that come most spontaneously to their lips, often in the end reveal their own hidden faults, since they naturally hate what they most resemble.

There were always reasons for what I did. Good reasons or bad reasons, I don't know, in any case human reasons. Those who kill are humans, just like those who are killed, that's what's terrible. You

If we were committing an injustice, we ought to think about it, and decide if it was necessary and inevitable, or if it was only the result of taking the easy way out, of laziness, of a lack of thought. It was a question of rigor. I knew that these decisions were made at a much higher level than our own; still, we weren't automatons, it was important not just to obey orders, but to adhere to them; yet I was having doubts, and that troubled me. Finally

Please, mein Herr, shoot the children cleanly.

So what's the most atrocious thing you've seen?" He waved his hand: "Man, of course!

One night, he confessed to me that he was horrified by his first experience of the radical methods used by the Wehrmacht and the SS to combat the partisans; but his profound conviction that only a barbarous, completely inhuman enemy could necessitate such extreme measures had in the end been reinforced. "In the SD, you must have seen some atrocious things," he added; I assured him I had, but preferred not to elaborate. Instead

Political philosophers have often pointed out that in wartime, the citizen, the male citizen at least, loses one of his most basic rights, his right to life; and this has been true ever since the French Revolution and the invention of conscription, now an almost universally accepted principle. But these same philosophers have rarely noted that the citizen in question simultaneously loses another right, one just as basic and perhaps even more vital for his conception of himself as a civilized human being: the right not to kill. No

Your first time?" the Hauptman gently asked. I nodded. "You'll get used to it," he went on, "but maybe never completely." He