Colin Jack

“I know people would have liked me to say: You’re not going to die, I’ll save you. And not because I would have actually saved them, done my job, done the necessary, sent rescue. Not because I’d done what you’re meant to do. They wanted me to have said it, at least to have said it, just to have said the words. That was what the investigator was waiting for anxiously, for everyone to hear, to hear their own voice in mine in these recordings. The voice of each of us saying I will save you. Each one in my place. The voice of the whole of humanity reassured to hear itself saying, uttering the words: I will save you; you will not die – not actually saving, no one cares about that, not acting, not even helping. But at least saying it, because to fail to say those words is to be less than human. In the end, whether they drowned or not didn’t matter; what mattered were my words. What mattered was not that they were saved; it was that I should be saved, and the whole world with me, through these words. Saved by my own words, not condemned by them.”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat

“Some men are happiest when they don't have to move an inch from their hearths. But for some of us, to sit still is to feel the weight of six feet of earth on our chests.”
― Deepa Anappara, The Last of Earth

“...the sea was always with me. There it lay, the entire length of my journey, on my right, poisoned. There were the terns and the gulls, the greyness, the pallid light, the sea with its guts glutted with women and children. Sometimes, despite the fatigue of the night shift, I had to stop on the way, park the car by the roadside and walk to the edge of the cliff to look at it: the progression of cargo ships, their hypnotic slowness, and it, at my feet, in front of me, lifeless, enormous, malign. Universal and monstrous. It’s the one thing that never sleeps.”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat

“…I’ll say: Hey, jerk, see that guy sleeping in a cardboard box at the foot of your building? He’s rowing across the tarmac, he’s sinking too. But he’s not dozens of kilometres out at sea, at dead of night, he is quite easy to geolocate, he’s just in front of your feet. So are you going to send him help or is that my job again?”
― Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat