The Soccer War Quotes

“For those awaiting death as we were, passive and apathetic, on the verge of collapse, ready to hit bottom, it only takes one flash of light in the darkness, one lucky break, and suddenly you rise up again and return to the living. What you leave behind, however, is an empty territory that you cannot even describe: it has no points of reference or shapes or signposts, and its existence—like the sound barrier—is something you feel only once you have approached it. One step of that emptiness and it disappears. No one, however, who has entered this emptiness can ever be the same person he was before. Something remains—a psychological scar, hardened, gangrened flesh—a fact finally more apparent to others than to himself, that something has burned out, that something is missing. You pay for every meeting with death.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, The Soccer War

“In my country, the war did not pass anyone by; it went through every home, it smashed its rifle butt against every door, it burned dozens of cities and thousands of villages. The war wounded everyone, and those who survived cannot cure themselves of it. A person who lived through a great war is different from someone who never lived through any war. They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language, because you cannot really describe the war, you cannot share it, you cannot tell someone: Here, take a little bit of my war. Everyone has to live out his own war to the end.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński