21
" Wallau had been brought into the camp two months after him. “So you are George.” Hearing the older man greet him with these four words, George had, for the first time, fully felt his own worth. A prisoner who’d been released had talked about him, George, on the outside. While he was being tortured nearly to death in Westhofen, people in the villages and towns where he had once lived had formed an impression of George, his indestructible monument. Even now, even here next to this ice-cold wall, George thought: If Westhofen were the only place I could see Wallau, I’d take it all on again ... For the first time and maybe for the last in his young life there had been a friendship that wasn’t all about swagger and showing off or humbling yourself in order to cling to someone and giving yourself up completely, but rather just being the person you were and being loved for that. "
― Anna Seghers , Das siebte Kreuz
35
" Chance, if you let it take over, is not blind at all, as they say, but clever, even witty. You just have to trust in it completely. If you interfere and try to help it along, then things get bungled and chance mistakenly gets the blame. If you just leave everything to it and yield to it completely, then it usually arrives at the right outcome quickly, unpredictably, and directly. "
― Anna Seghers , Das siebte Kreuz