“Because we realised that the person who left us did not take the sun with them or leave darkness in their place. They simply left, and with every farewell comes a hidden hope.”

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra

Adieu les monstres! Adieu les saints! Adieu l'orgueil! Il n'y a que des hommes.
Act 10, sc. 4
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

1986

Night (1960)

Source: The Impossible Knife of Memory

Part I, Ch. 6
My Mortal Enemy (1926)
Context: Now everything was in ruins. The air was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me seemed evil. When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

Context: We hope for lives whose story leaves us looking admirable; we like our weaknesses to be hidden and deniable... We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience... Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world's resources, or the way our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world... Racists and sexists, like antebellum slave owners in America, always have to tell themselves a story that justifies their system.

Simon Blackburn, Being Good (2001)

Source: Ender's Game