“She felt as if she was standing at the edge of an abyss, but she was in no way counting on God to rescue her. On the contrary. I don’t believe in any of it. Not anymore.”
“If the boy did have a good and loving mother somewhere, surely they would find her.
God only knew how she wanted to believe it. Every single day, she practiced her detachment skills, trying not to care about everything that was wrong with the world. Or rather...to care, but in a suitably civilized manner, with an admirable commitment that might still be set aside when she came home to Morten and her family, complete with well-reasoned and coherent opinions of the humanist persuasion. Right now she felt more like one of those manic women from the animal protection societies, with wild hair and ever wilder eyes. Desperate.”
“Only as long as one did what one always did would one remain relatively invisible.”
“Nina couldn’t help wondering if the lives of other people were really as simple as they looked. As simple, and as happy.”
“And the real beauty of it all for the cynical exploiters was that ordinary people didn’t care. Not really. No one had asked the refugees, the prostitutes, the fortune hunters, and the orphans to come knocking on Denmark’s door. No one had invited them, and no one knew how many there were. Crimes committed against them had nothing to do with ordinary people and the usual workings of law and order. It”
“She knew precious little about Lithuania, she realized, and her ideas had run along the lines of Soviet concrete ghettos, TB-infected prisons, and a callous mafia. Somehow,”
“Os pecadores eram bem mais interessantes que as pessoas comuns – a própria Bíblia atestava isso.”
“Today I keep thinking of all the people who have left and never returned — my brothers, Khan Tegus, our guards, this entire city. What a strange, dark world that swallows people whole.”
“It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.”
“This necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessing of which, would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen, that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other; and this remissness, will point out the necessity, of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.”
“Anymore, no one's mind is their own.”
“Don't they feed you at Navarre house?"
"They throw out some gruel between the indoctrination sessions and propaganda films. Then we're off marching around the grounds and the recitation of sonnets to Celina's loveliness.”
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