Eric Adolf

“I often think men have no understanding of what’s not honorable though they’re always talking of it”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Instantly they fettered him, and carried him away to the regiment. There he was made to wheel about to the right, and to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his rammer, to present, to fire, to march, and they gave him thirty blows with a cudgel. The next day he did his exercise a little less badly, and he received but twenty blows. The day following they gave him only ten, and he was regarded by his comrades as a prodigy. Candide,”
― Voltaire, Candide

“Abruptly, then, and very quickly, she went in the farthest and most anonymous-looking of the seven or eight enclosures-which, by luck, didn’t require a coin for entrance-closed the door behind her, and, with some little difficulty, manipulated the bolt to a locked position. Without any apparent regard to the suchness of her environment, she sat down. She brought her knees together very firmly, as if to make herself a smaller, more compact unit. Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black. Her extended fingers, though trembling or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty. She held that tense, almost fetal position for a suspensory moment-then broke down. She cried for fully five minutes. She cried without trying to suppress any of the noisier manifestations of grief and confusion with all the convulsive throat sounds that a hysterical child makes when the breath is trying to get up through a partly closed epiglottis. And yet, when finally she stopped, she merely stopped without the painful, knifelike intakes of breath that usually follow a violent outburst-inburst. When she stopped, it was as though some momentous change of polarity had taken place inside her mind, one that had an immediate, pacifying effect on her body.”
― J. D. Salinger

“How much water are you going to use, idiot? Who on earth washes like that?'
'I’ll never get it clean otherwise, citizen chief. It’s thick with mud.'
'Didn’t you ever watch your wife scrub the floor, pig?'
Shukhov drew himself up, the dripping rag in his hand, He smiled ingenuously, revealing the gaps in his teeth, the result of a touch of scurvy at Ust-Izhma in 1943. And what a touch it was - his exhausted stomach wouldn't hold any kind of food, and his bowels could move nothing but a bloody fluid. But now only a lisp remained from that old trouble.
'I was taken away from my wife in forty-one, citizen chief. I’ve forgotten what she was like.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich