Lubinka Dimitrova

“Toxic people attach themselves like cinder blocks tied to your ankles, and then invite you for a swim in their poisoned waters.”
― John Mark Green

“How did you make it out of there alive?” “My parents loved me a lot when I was little.” We’re saved by the amount of love we get, it’s our safety net. Yes…only love can save us. Love is a vitamin that humans can’t live without—the blood curdles, the heart stops. I”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire

“Live, don't know how long,
And die, don't know when;
Must go, don't know where;
I am astonished I am so cheerful.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water