“I say – what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean”
In her speeches, Elizabeth tries to be as laconic as possible. She is an elderly woman with a large burden of experience, and she is tired. This tiredness is rather felt till the end of her visit, and her son John sees it when he drives her to the airport after the visit. All her life she had been trying to do something special, something important and significant, but even after so many efforts taken she does not understand quite where she is - what is her place in the world and what is her purpose.
“The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another”
When talking about the Holocaust, Elizabeth shows how full of contempt her feelings towards the Nazis are. She must really hate the inhumanity they showed concerning other human beings, and the main reason for this is that they must have lost their hearts, as only heartless people can kill others with no regret. She demands her listeners to listen to their hearts, and never let the feeling of sympathy leave them.
“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”
Elizabeth Costello draws a parallel between the camps for Jews and farms which she calls “factories of death”. She says that the Nazis showed extreme cruelty killing people like lice, but even now people continue being cruel when growing the animals with only one purpose – to kill them.
