Jing

“She had collided with an elk and died...At twenty-four minutes to eleven her heart had stopped pumping the blood around her body.

One single muscle in a single person's body. A speck of dust in time. And the world was dead. David stood next to her bed with his arms by his sides, the headache burning behind his forehead.

Here lay his whole future, everything good that he could even imagine would come from life. Here lay the last twelve years of his past. Everything gone; and time shrank to a single unbearable now.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Handling the Undead

“Three, four, ten, thirty multi-coloured little beings with backpacks ran down the stairs, Pieces of humanity, a mass to direct and discipline. Four hundred of them were stuffed into this building six hours a day, four hundred were let out again when those six hours were up.

Material.

But zoom in on one single child and there you had an upholder of the world. A child with a mother and father, grandparents, relatives and friends. A child whose existence is necessary for the proper functioning of many lives. Children are fragile, and carry so many lives on their frail shoulders. Fragile is their world, controlled by adults. Everything is fragile.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist

“The sun had set when we left the museum that day, and the holidaymakers had long since departed. The wind had dropped; already a nighttime chill had begun to creep into the air. In the brief desert twilight the pyramids stood out in all their ruined majesty, dark hulks that loomed
against the last apricot-coloured g l ow in the western sky. At night the Giza plateau is a lonely place, cold and forbidding, inhabited only by a
few guards, wrapped like mummies against the night wind, and the yapping, threatening pi-dogs of Egypt.

From a time long before King Cheops this plateau had been a sacred burying ground, and even today there is about it a sense of holiness and mystery, especially in the empty silences of the night. The ancient people who built these monuments, and apparently buried their kings within, are in a way as mysterious to us as the pyramids themselves.”
― Nancy Jenkins

“I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.”
― Lawrence Durrell