The image of Egyptian soldiers dead in the deserts of the Sinai torments me as much as the ramps at Auschwitz. I know what these very soldiers would have done had they succeeded in entering the Jews' cities. But now they are the dead: now I grieve for them. I can make no distinction between the dead. I have no power over myself in this matter, I cannot violate this fundamental belief.
(Emphases original. It is possibly useful context that Canetti was Jewish, and had fled from Austria to the UK in 1938.)
All endings are cruel, and every human life is a heroic life, and dying—everywhere, and under no matter what circumstances—is equally bleak, cruel, and sad, and every human being must prepare himself for the poorest and worst exigencies, and every room in which a dead person is laid out is a tragic room, and there was never a human life that lacked tragedy of the most sublime sort.
(Here Canetti is, we are told, quoting Robert Walser, 'Frau Scheer'.)
