Danuta Hinc

“It had taken Nick most of his life and mine, but he’d finally quit drinking. After he got sober he began to send me birthday cards—signed with many Xs and Os, pink and flowery with effusive definitions of wonderful daughters. He’d send me these cards even though I had never been a wonderful daughter to him. Did he know from my mother that I could be when I wanted to? Or was it just the kind of magical thinking he and I had always been so good at—conjuring up a story and believing it in an attempt to make it true?”
― Andrea Jarrell, I'm the One Who Got Away

“WE ARE NOT WHAT we think we are. The stories we tell of ourselves are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat on the open sea. There were moments before the memory’s return when I experienced what I now understand as its absence as not a gap but a whole other self, a whole other me. As if a copy of me had secretly replaced me. An android of me moving through the landscape, independent of the other me, exactly like me but not me. Every now and then, I could see the distance between us. Three times, in particular, this other self had appeared before me.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“In Poland there is a meaning to defeat that perhaps is unknown in countries differently situated. Along with a strong sense of unity as a people, there is present an awareness that a defeat in war entails unique and drastic consequences. Other nations may be oppressed and dominated after losing a war; they may have war reparations imposed on them, or limits on their army, sometimes even their boundaries are changed. But when a Polish soldier was beaten on the battlefield, the specter of total annihilation swooped down upon the entire nation: its neighbors would pillage and divide up its land, and try to destroy its language and culture. That is why, to us, war took on the character of total war.”
― Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World

“Was it possible to live outside language? Naturally this question did not address itself to her in words, or as a single lucid sentence. It addressed itself to her as a soundless, embryonic howl.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness