JoAnna

“He was not yet in the Church, but already a sin without a name had occurred to him. Ordinarily, the thought might give him pleasure. He remembered Nunes saying that a man must come into the Church on his own intellectual level. And in a horror, remote but clear, saw that the more intelligent a man was, the more various the sins he was capable of committing.”
― Harry Sylvester, Dayspring

“Faced with their confused glances and naive questions, I saw that there indeed was, between the writers and that public, however benevolent and sympathetic, a visible barrier. The audience simply did not have enough background information to comprehend what the writers sitting in front of them on the podium were saying.

Confronted with such a lack of understanding, I felt that I had no other choice but to hang on to 'my' group, the writers from Eastern Europe. At least they knew what I was talking about; at least we understood each other's problems, if that was of any comfort to a single one of us. And in any case, even if I had loudly screamed that I didn't want to belong to any group at all, the audience would have put me with them. Perhaps for the first time I became aware of how tired I was of constantly being pushed back into 'my place' every time I made an attempt to break out of it.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, Café Europa: Life After Communism

“Even at his age he knew that there are basically two categories of people in a society: those who have, and those who have not. But according to the egalitarian principles of any communist society, those 'haves' should share with the 'have nots.' And because there is not much to share anyway, in the end that egalitarianism boils down to the equal distribution of poverty.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, Café Europa: Life After Communism

“He let his mind go, following its apparently new logic: it came to a matter of self-control, something laughed at by himself and virtually all the people he knew in the universities. He personally associated it with being a Boy Scout. In something not unlike terror, he saw how the great truths had been made banal for the popular taste; how the oversimplifying of them was a danger to himself and others dedicated to the complex and subtle. The terror became real in him as he saw for a second time, with a clarity equivalent to physical sight, how much more difficult it was for an intelligent person to be saved.”
― Harry Sylvester, Dayspring