Quotations

".....and if you ask what wrong he has done in his life, you could say that he has done practically none, except that he has not done anything! He has sinned by not sinning. He has not lived. If you live you are forced to sin: if you eat, then others cannot have that food. We shut our eyes to the fact that thousands of animals are butchered so that we may live. To live is to commit murder, and the more intensely I live the more I do wrong. 

"Life is connected with guilt, and he, by not living, has not accumulated much active guilt, but he has accumulated a tremendous amount of passive guilt. Think of all the girls he has just walked out on. True, he has not shouted at them or given them illegitimate babies. He has not done all those things that a more virile man might perhaps have done, but he just let women down by disappearing, which is as cruel and immoral as to do something which is called wrong. He has committed the sin of not living. He is typical of the kind of man who, on account of his mother complex, has a too aesthetic and high- up attitude toward life, who thinks that by staying above it all he can keep up an illusion of purity and innocence."

Marie Louise Von Franz, 'The Problem of the Puer Aeternus'

"The Jewish experience in the second world war was not ‘historical’. We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious, the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day."

Aharon Appelfeld to Philip Roth in an interview.

"The stranger that liveth with thee in the land, shall rise up over thee, and shall be higher: and thou shalt go down, and be lower. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him. He shall be as the head, and thou shalt be the tail. And all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue and overtake thee, till thou perish: because thou heardst not the voice of the Lord thy God, and didst not keep his commandments and ceremonies which he commanded thee."

Deuteronomy 28: 43-45