“Liberty medals...Are they trying to bribe me with coloured ribbons? I wouldn't kill a man for one of those things. Or go and be killed. Any shooting I do is to save my own life, and not for a ribbon and a hunk of bronze. [says Mäkelä]”
― Väinö Linna, quote from The Unknown Soldier
“Hän hymähti pari kertaa katkerasti, ei niinkään paljon valtiollisesta vihasta kuin sen vuoksi, että hänen kengässään oli hiekkaa, eikä hän voinut jäädä poistamaan sitä, koska olisi jäänyt toisista liian kauas.”
― Väinö Linna, quote from The Unknown Soldier
“―Viipuri vallattu, kähisi hän eteenpäin, huomaamatta muuttaa äänensävyään, niin että edelläkulkeva mies sai ilmoituksen vihan pakahduttamalla äänellä, ikään kuin pahinta, mitä Lehto tiesi maailmassa olevan, olisi ollut Viipurin valtaus.”
― Väinö Linna, quote from The Unknown Soldier
“Kerran he joutuivat jättämään haavoittuneen, perääntyessään eräältä kukkulalta. Kun he valtasivat mäen takaisin, löysivät he miehen alusvaatteilleen riisuttuna, pistimen reikä kyljessä. Muuan Kariluodon konepistoolimies ampui siitä hyvästä ohimennen, kainalostaan tähdäten, kolme antautunutta. Kaksi päivää myöhemmin sama mies katkesi keskeltä kranaatin täysosumasta. Kuolema lakkasi olemasta moraalinen kysymys”
― Väinö Linna, quote from The Unknown Soldier
“Taken thus by surprise, it was several moments before she was able to decide whether to make herself known to him, or to await a formal introduction. The strict propriety in which she had been reared urged her to adopt the latter course; then she remembered that she was not a young girl any longer, but a guardian-aunt ... To flinch before what would certainly be an extremely disagreeable interview would be the act, she told herself, of a pudding-heart. Bracing herself resolutely, she got up from the writing-table, and turned, saying, in a cool, pleasant tone: 'Mr Calverleigh?'
He had picked up a newspaper from the table in the centre of the room, and was glancing through it, but he lowered it, and looked enquiringly across at her. His eyes, which were deep-set and of a light grey made the more striking by the swarthiness of his complexion, held an expression of faint surprise; he said: 'Yes?”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Black Sheep
“Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.
Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.
Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from All of Us: The Collected Poems
“[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.”
― Jane Jacobs, quote from The Death and Life of Great American Cities
“I should have liked this particular story to end with me settled happily ever after in the hut on the island, but it didn't happen. It wasn't long before I had to face the fact that I was living in the sea.”
― Meg Rosoff, quote from What I Was
“But now her children were grown-up and she felt every inch of the distance between them, stretching further over the years.”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
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