Sunday, November 29, 2020

For all...fall short...

Quoted by Patrick Kurp, from Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. I've read the first paragraph many times because it is often quoted, but probably not the second since I read the book years ago.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.

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