Christine

“The women posed for snapshots. Dozens of snapshots. . . . They imagined that, long after the soldiers had become old, perhaps even after they'd died, someone would come to wonder about these women holding up rifles or tommy guns or donuts and laughing with their grandfathers in front of the big dark truck.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Good Night, Irene

“It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“I came across an Etruscan word, saeculum, which is a concept, or marker, of a temporal interval. Generally speaking, it is the span of time lived by the oldest person present. The day will come…when the last person to have fought in Vietnam will die. . . .Who will remember when . . . a car had to be cranked to start or when the clank of an ice delivery man carrying fifty-pound block in tongs brought merriment to the afternoon?

I wonder, then, what would be my saeculum. Or whom. I wonder what young nephew or niece’s child, siphoned through the tunnel of time, would see a faded photograph of me and search their memories for my name. I think he was some sort of great-uncle, she or he will say. I don’t remember exactly. Look at his clothes!”
― Joseph Monninger, Goodbye to Clocks Ticking: How We Live While Dying