Narmadhaa S

“She spots a large army of green ants building a nest between two thin twig branches of a flimsy tree with floppy green leaves. "Look at this, Yukio," Molly whispers, leaning into the tree where a line of ants with amber bodies and glowing jay-coloured abdomens are carrying a white grub along a designated worker road on a branch. "They make their homes out of leaves. Some of the ants are the tough ones who will work together to haul the leaves up, and some of the ants are the clever ones who will weave the leaves together, and some of them are gluers who use that white stuff they're carrying to stick all the leaves in place.

Yukio releases a brief sigh of awe. "Hmm."

"See the bridge?" Molly asks. The ants had built a bridge out of their own connected bodies to create a shortcut for the gluers wanting to access a branch below them. "I wish that fella Adolf Hitler could see this," Molly whispers.

"Hitler?" Yukio echoes confused.

"Yeah," Molly says. "We could get Hitler and what's-his-name—Musolino—"

"Mussolini," Yukio says.

"Yeah! Mussolini," Molly says. "We get Hitler, Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all together and they could come and look at this ant bridge for a while. Calm themselves down a bit. Just watching some green ants working for an hour or two.”
― Trent Dalton, All Our Shimmering Skies

“For a long time the horror that these images elicited remained buried inside him. A morbid reality he was constantly feeding and yet he was unable to express. As though unable to fully believe or understand what they depicted. It was only when the channel 4 documentary came out in 2011, accusing the government of war crimes and genocide, when later that year the UN published its report, giving an estimate of how many civilians had died that he was finally able to speak about what had happened. To accept that the images he had become obsessed with were not some strange perverted creation of his subconscious life but they represented things that had really happened in the country he was from. Even now he felt ashamed thinking about his reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened at the end of the war. As though he had been hesitating to believe the evidence on his computer screen because his own poor violated stateless people were the ones alleging it. As though he was unable to take the suffering of his own people seriously till it was validated by the panel of foreign authority experts, legitimised by a documentary, narrated by a clean shaven white man standing in front of a camera in suit and tie.”
― Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North

“Show yourselves men my friends, and keep a stout heart. Think of your honour. With all men’s eyes upon you it is a shame to be a coward. He that fights and will not run may live to see another sun. He that runs and will not fight is bound to die and serves him right.”
― Homer, Iliad

“The pall bearers were holding Pete's coffin, waiting to walk down the aisle—just like bridesmaids. The music began and they started to move, trying to keep pace with David Bowie's 'Changes'.”
― Jane Caro, The Mother