
“It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies.”
Homecoming saga, Earthborn (1995)
though their reasons are absurd!
"Definition"
Shades of the World (1985)
“It occurred to me that if my friends were loathsome, perhaps I needed to learn from my enemies.”
Homecoming saga, Earthborn (1995)
Roses From my Friends
Song lyrics, The Will to Live (1997)
On life in hiding from Nazi authorities, p. 48
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Context: One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn't see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot. I learned, because there was no interruption. I had access to myself, to my thinking. I wouldn't say that I particularly matured. The thinking was physics thinking. I was just short of twenty-two then.
I was in hiding for two years and two months, something like that. In all that time I went out very, very little, just once in a great while, after dark. Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane.
Thank Goodness! (2006)
Context: Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism. Had I had an epiphany? Was I going to follow in the footsteps of Ayer (who recovered his aplomb and insisted a few days later "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief"), or was my atheism still intact and unchanged?
Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.
On his leaving the music industry after his hits of the 80s, as quoted in Metro (3 September 2004) http://www.stockaitkenwaterman.com/artists/astl07.htm
Caroline Now! interview (20 April 2000) http://www.marina.com/brian.htm
Remark to editor William Alan White, as quoted in Thomas Harry Williams et al. (1959) A History of the United States.
1920s