When it was over, nothing defined us: other than the moments that made us feel free.

Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.

Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.

Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.

For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine.

And now that we don't have to be good, we can be free.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

For we are not tortured anymore; we have seen beyond your lies and disguises, and we have mastered the language of words, we have mastered speech and know we have also seen ourselves raw and naked piece by piece until our flesh lies flayed with blood on our own hands.

O victory forget you're underwear we're free.

At the bottom of the fall we were able to stand again on dry land. The rope could not be recovered. We had flung down the adze from the top of the fall and also the logbook and the cooker wrapped in one of our blouses. That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had "suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders." We had reached the naked soul of man.

Everything that’s really worthwhile in life came to us free — our minds, our souls, our bodies, our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions, our intelligence, our love of family and children and friends and country.

"When life is "enough", we don't need any more."

When we have accepted the worst, we have nothing more to lose. And that automatically means — we have everything to gain!