John Kelleher

“The poor girl doesn’t eat enough to be either depraved or virtuous.”
― Camilo José Cela, The Hive

“Or to put it inversely, by presuming we know the ultimate nature of reality, we limit our ability to understand.”
― William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Doña Visitación is a kindly woman and doesn’t believe that the working class should be slowly starved. *”
― Camilo José Cela, The Hive

“This was a special kind of murder. The merest scratch is enough to kill any haemophiliac, and Lenin knew this. But he had no compunction about ordering the firing of countless machine-gun bullets that would cause thousands of deaths as well as that of the child-tsar. ‘And I imagine how this man, now at the summit of power, had been on some dark alley in Zurich a few years before, face to face with some tiny prostitute, this ordinary, timid little man with a few words of German: “What’s your price, girl?” Disgusting isn’t it? Yet this jerk with thinning hair, in this sole moment where he shows some humanity, when a little European whore is about to share her syphilis, seems an angel compared to that repellent leader of Russia with his percentages. ‘ “Little whore, you came too late. Too late by several years.” ’ I was stunned and couldn’t grasp what he meant.”
― Ismail Kadare, A Dictator Calls