“In the glare, the great and terrible light of this happening, God seems to signal that the story of the rest of us need not end, and that the new light can prove a troubled dawn.
For the rest of us, perhaps. Not for the dead, not for the more than fifty million real dead in the world's worst catastrophe: victors and vanquished, combatants and civilians, people of so many nations, men, women, and children, all cut down. For them there can be no new earthly dawn. Yet thought their bones like in the darkness of the grave, they will not have died in vain, if their remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace.”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“Of course the Russians under Zhukov were”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“Your country baffles me: a luxurious unharmed lotus land in which great hordes of handsome dynamic people either wallow in deep gloom, or play like overexcited children, or fall to work like all the devils in hell, while the press steadily drones detestation of the government and despair of the system. I don’t understand how America works, any more than Frances Trollope or Dickens did, but it’s an ongoing miracle of sorts.”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“dithyramb coming to majestic life: a swarm of fresh seapower”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“assailing her. Were they doing the”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“How far they came to perish here, these soldiers and these machines! What bizarre train of events brought youngsters from the Rhineland and Prussia, from the Scottish Highlands and London, from Australia and New Zealand, to butt at each other to the death with flame-spitting machinery in faraway Africa, in a setting as dry and lonesome as the moon?
But that is the hallmark of this war. No other war has ever been like it. This war rings the world.... Men fight as far from home as they can be transported, with courage and endurance that makes one proud of the human race, in horrible contrivances that make one ashamed of the human race.”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“face grew longer and grimmer as Berel”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“shot at. All I did at Wotje was lose control”
― Herman Wouk, quote from War and Remembrance
“Él necesitaba ser capaz de vivir sin preocuparse por mí. Yo necesitaba ser capaz de vivir. Su naturaleza protectora comenzaba a ahogarme y lo amaba demasiado para herirlo diciéndole algo. Iba a tener malos momentos. Iba a dar un traspié con mi cabeza a veces y él no podría estar siempre ahí para mí. Solamente no sabía cómo hacerle entender y aceptar eso. ¿Cómo podríamos hacer que esto funcionara? No podría ser para siempre.”
― Abbi Glines, quote from Simple Perfection
“The Delores tank rolled on inexorably, “You get a mortgage to buy a house, a larger mortgage than the previous owner because the price of the house has been artificially increased by the market, which is controlled by the banks. Then you live in the house for a few years paying a lot more in mortgage payments than you would if you were renting a similar property. But hey, you ‘own’ it and can ‘do things to it’… things that cost even more money, by the way… so you maintain its upkeep, improve it with say a new kitchen or bathroom; the more salubrious the neighbourhood the more expensive the kitchen would need to be – a Küche & Cucina, say; impressing your cleaner is very important after all and at the end you sell it to someone else for more than you paid for it so they’ll need an even bigger mortgage. And all the while everyone is paying all this money to the banks and the banks give the money to their shareholders, the biggest of whom are the incredibly rich. This, when you boil it all down, means that you’re taking a large sum out of your wages and passing it across to some rich person to live large, whilst you and others like you struggle to make their monthly payments. Basically you’ve been screwed, Doc, but somehow they’ve convinced you that you own a bit of England, when the truth is you don’t really own anything, you’re just renting it at a higher cost and they can take it back from you any time they want. It’s all just a card trick, Doc. All just ‘smoke and mirrors’ and that’s what’s getting to me.”
― Arun D. Ellis, quote from Corpalism
“I'm lying here in a tent, pretending to be asleep but actually fearing for my life as I watch a bunny murderer have a conversation with our campfire.”
― Amy Plum, quote from After the End
“I choose you, James Thomas Kellan MacCrae,to be my king and coruler.”
― Carey Corp, quote from Doon
“At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life. Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
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