[...] elle avait des yeux où il faisait si bon vivre que je n'ai jamais su où aller depuis. - Romain Gary

I guess I’m only talking about my childhood. Things that become part of you when you’re a child and then you grow up and somehow they don’t — and that’s how you never get to be a mature person, an adult, with those naïve beliefs in you that never grew up . . .

Gari in Russian means "burn!"… I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off.

The inhumanity of it is what makes Nazism so horrible — that's what people always say. Sure. But there's no denying the obvious: part of being human is the inhumanity of it. As long as we refuse to admit that inhumanity is completely human, we'll just be telling ourselves pious lies.