Raphael Hanna

“We don't have a government, friend. We have parties, factions, warring interests; and the man in the street doesn't know where to turn. Who represents a government to him? A cop who walks away from a traffic jam; some little clerk in the pensions office who slams a window in his face.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander

“he knew, and knew profoundly. He enjoyed. He savoured. He had made his own sense of the mad mathematics of creation.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander

“I understood, vividly, the frustration of the revolutionary who wanted to sweep the whole mess out of existence and begin again. I understood the despair of the young, who wanted to drop out, like the Poverello of Assisi, and live in fraternal simplicity on cannabis and corn-bread. I understood the seductive illusion of dictatorship: that one messianic man armed with plenary power could impose order and unity with a wave of his sceptre. More slowly, I began to see Bruno Manzini's belief that we were all prisoners of our genes and our history and that our future was written by scribes long perished.”
― Morris L. West, The Salamander

“Even if you weren't born in Versailles, Athens, Rome, or Paris, the sublime will always find a form in which to appear before you. If you haven't read Pseudo Longinus, haven't heard of Kant, or if you inhabit the eternal, illiterate fields of anonymous villages and towns, of empty days and nights, the sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow