Scott

“Chad Gadya,” the Passover song he was taught by the rabbis in school, one he would sing to himself in the many nights during which sleep felt like something that only others could enjoy, a nursery rhyme that tells the story of a father who buys a young goat for two farthings, but then the kid—who the wise men said represented Israel in its purest, most innocent state—is killed by a cat, which is bitten by a dog, which is wounded by a stick, which is burned by fire, which is quenched by water, which is drunk by an ox, which is slaughtered by a man, in an unbroken chain of cause and effect, sin and penance, crime and punishment, that reaches all the way to heaven, where the Mighty Lord himself, the Holy One, Blessed be He, smites the angel of death, establishing the Kingdom of God,”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“When I woke up again it was light. I found two of my girlfriend’s old T-shirts in a wardrobe. She must have left them when visiting a long time ago. One was white, and said Russian assets in black across the top of the chest. The other was blue and said brat. It smelled of her, just about. Or I hoped it did.”
― Gabriel Smith, Brat

“The reasoning here is typical of Kershaw’s work, which is marred by his describing everything, and I mean everything, about Hitler extremely negatively, even such aspects as relate to his childhood and youth, as if his whole life were tainted by what he would become and do some twenty years later, as if in some way he were evil incarnate, or as if evil were some core inside him, immutable and irremediable, and thereby an explanation of why things turned out the way they did.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“Bloodshed, rape, robbery, torture, and famine were less revolting to a people whose ordinary life was encompassed by them in milder forms.”
― C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War