The documents discuss themes of chance, memory, loss, and suffering. One recalls the fleeting nature of chance encounters and experiences. Another describes the trauma of surviving a concentration camp and losing faith. A third reflects on coping with migraines and learning to accept unavoidable pain and hardship.

1. As the corpse went past, the flies left the
restaurant table in a cloud and rushed
after it, but they came back a few
minutes later.
George Orwell, “Marrakesh”

2. Where all was burnt to ash before them no
fires were to be had and the nights were long
and dark and cold beyond anything they’d yet
encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To
take your life. He held the boy shivering
against him and counted each frail breath in
the blackness.
Cormac McArthy, The Road

3. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is
not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither
yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of
understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but
time and chance happeneth to them all.
King James Bible

4. And I have learned how to live with it, learned
when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how
to regard it when it does come as more friend
than lodger. We have reached a certain
understanding, my migraine and I.
Joan Didion, “Migraines”

5. It is a face seen once and lost forever in a
crowd, an eye that looked, a face that smiled and
vanished on a passing train, it is the prescience of
snow upon a certain night, the laughter of a
woman in a summer street long years ago, it is the
memory of a single moon seen at the pines’ dark
edge in old October – and all our lives are written
in the twisting of a leaf upon a bough, a door that
opened, and a stone.
Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

6. Then I shall come back through the trembling lanes
under the arches of the nut leaves. I shall pass an old
woman wheeling a perambulator full of sticks; and the
shepherd. But we shall not speak. I shall come back
through the kitchen garden, and see the curved leaves
of the cabbages pebbled with dew, and the house in
the garden, blind with curtained windows. I shall go
upstairs to my room, and turn over my own
things, locked carefully in the wardrobe: my shells; my
eggs; my curious grasses. I shall feed my doves and my
squirrel. I shall go to the kennel and comb my spaniel.
So gradually I shall turn over the hard thing that has
grown here in my side. But here bells ring; feet shuffle
perpetually.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves

7. Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which
has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed
and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose
bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent
blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith
forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived
me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget
those moments which murdered my god and my soul and
turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these
things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.
Elie Wiesel