624 pages
Rating: (1.1K votes)
“When General George Patton tried to convince Eisenhower to make a push to conquer the city first, Eisenhower blithely asked, 'Well, who would want it?”
“Enjoy the war,' read the graffiti left on Berlin's walls. 'The peace will be terrible.”
“Eventually, a Soviet general sat down in the empty seat next to Howley. Rank-conscious, the Russian visibly shuddered when he realized he was sitting next to someone of much lower position. 'I see you're a colonel,' he said through an interpreter. Howley looked up from his plate and grumbled, 'I see you're a general. Here, have some salami.”
“World War II ended in a battle for a single buildng, Germany's Reichstag...7,000 German troops defending the building...Nearly 5,000 men died in a battle for the building.”
“Ad they entered Berlin, while still killing off the last of its German defenders, The Russians indulged in an orgy of rape and rage beyond the bounds of human Imagination. Over the course of ten days, about 130,000 women were raped---”
“The Russians would lose 305,000 troops in the last 42 miles approaching Berlin---about the number of American army soldiers who died in all of World War II. Of the 125,000 of Berlin's civilians who died in the Russian attack, 6,400 were suicides;”
“Five thousand boys and girls under the age of sixteen were estimated to have fought in the defense of Berlin. Five hundred survived.”
“The president didn't ask me any questions. But I'm glad he didn't, because I was so shocked watching him that I don't think I could have made a sesible reply.' He turned to look Byrnes squarely in the eye. 'We've been talking to a dying man.”
“The agreement,' the colonel announced, 'says thirty-seven officers, fifty vehicles, and one hundred seventy five men.'
'What agreement?'
'The Berlin Agreement,”
“As the concert goers left the hall, the music of the end of the world still ringing in their ears, they filed out past children dressed in their Hitler Youth uniforms who had been assigned to helpfully hold out baskets filled with cyanide capsules for the crowd.”
“Doctors in 1945 would report that one of Berlin's children's favorite games was 'rape.' When they saw a man in uniform--even a Salvation Army uniform--they would start screaming hysterically.”
“Of babies born alive and in hospitals during that month of July 1945, 92 percent would die within then days.”
“True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction – don’t believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.”
“Once more, this is love: it rings and you open up unless it looks like an ax murderer.”
“The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. . . . Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. . . . Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of “kitsch men,” people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight.”
“We’re killing lots of dinosaurs though. The trains are helping.”
“The TRAINS are—“
“Only one derailed so far,” Urruah said cheerfully.”
“the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”
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