Julia B.

“La Soleá"

All in this world has broken.
All that’s left is silence.

(Leave me in this field
weeping.)”
― Federico García Lorca, The Selected Poems

“Each, as they smiled, tried to convey the sympathy which they could not formulate in words, because each knew that the other's thoughts had been ruled by a different discipline, whose idiom was also different. Beyond his smile the colonel was trying to say that soldiers were not all as wicked as the nun might believe them to be; and behind her smile the nun was trying to think across to the colonel that holiness was not as dull as soldiers imagined and that it was courage and not cowardice which impelled people to forsake the world and walk with God.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“That's just the trouble really. Nobody's shocked by anything anymore; we're not shocked by deceit, cruelty, lust for power, faithlessness, money-grubbing. Indeed, we accept it as inevitable that each and every one of our fellow men should be impelled only by selfishness. Well, sir, let me say that it's stupid of us not to be shocked, because the continuation of our civilisation depends precisely upon our ability to be shocked.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“His tired face was lit with a brief beauty as he smiled, and the two nuns and Colonel Nicobar and Twingo smiled too, glad to find a common ground for merriment, however momentary. For a few seconds Stalin, Pope Pius the Twelfth, and King George the Sixth laughed together in the persons of their representatives.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna