Kinga

“I carry my liberty with me. It is in my thoughts, in my head. Shakespeare is one of my countries, Goethe another. You can change that badge that I wear, but you can’t change the way I think. It is through my intellect that I can escape the roles, intrusions, and obligations with which every civilisation, every community would burden me. I make myself my own homeland through my affinities, my choices, my ideas, and no one can take it away from me – I may even be able to enlarge it. I don’t spend my life in the company of crowds but individuals. If I could pick fifty individuals from each nation, then perhaps I could put together a society I’d be happy with. My first possession is myself; better to sent it into exile than to lose it, to change a few habits rather than terminate my role as a human being. We only have one homeland: the world.”
― Gabriel Chevallier, Fear

“England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.”
― Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

“Did not Dr. Kunastrokius, that great man, at his leisure hours, take the greatest delight imaginable in combing of asses tails, and plucking the dead hairs out with his teeth, though he had tweezers always in his pocket?”
― Laurence Sterne

“(...) Sir Boris had fought and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and Sir Herbert, the Spaniard. But of all that killing and campaigning, that drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating, what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table – and again he paused. Like an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead, embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing – and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words were immortal.”
― Virginia Woolf