Laura

“But Navajos didn’t hurry. In fact, there was no word in the Navajo language for time.”
― Tony Hillerman, The Blessing Way

“All this is happening right next to you; you can almost touch it, but it's invisible ... At the big stations the loading and unloading of the dirty faces takes place far, far from the passenger platform and is seen only by switchmen and roadbed inspectors ... And you, hurrying along the platform with your children, your suitcases, and your string bags, are too busy to look closely ... The train starts - and a hundred crowded prisoner destinies, tormented hearts, are borne along the same snaky rails, behind the same smoke, past the same fields, posts, and haystacks as you ...You are dissatisfied because there are four of you in your compartment and it is crowded. And could you possibly believe ... that in the same size compartment as yours, but up ahead in that zak car, there are fourteen people? ... And if there are thirty? And ... why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water ... for enemies of the people? It isn't done especially to torture people. A sentenced prisoner is a laboring soldier of socialism, so why should he be tortured? They need him for construction work. But ... there is no reason in the world to treat him so well that people out in freedom would envy him ... Look around you ... Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this ...”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“My conscience, Sensei, tells me I cannot remain forever an artist of the floating world.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

“Our society doesn’t have the proper respect for magna cum laude”
― Tony Hillerman, The Blessing Way