“Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion - an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.”
― Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
― Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
“I often thought that the simples fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinantes me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them.”
― Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
― Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, tortured and hypnotized me, and I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world—as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.”
― Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
― Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“I'm not afraid of God. I'm afraid of man.”
― Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
― Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
Klari’s 2025 Year in Books
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