Anna Blecharz

“At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.)”
― Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

“And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface
They are essentially the same”
― Lao Tzu

“Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht’s heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. (...) The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention.”
― Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

“The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution