Boy Blue

“O, man, if you would only take one point of the compass and let me take any other, it would be the best for both of us.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped

“In the Vilnius ghetto, the news of German setbacks in the Soviet Union in the opening weeks of 1943 resulted in an upsurge of grim humour, as Herman Kruk recorded in his diary: A German asks a Jew to lend him 20 roubles. The Jew immediately takes the sum out of his pocket and gives it to him. The German wonders: ‘How can this be? You don’t know me at all, and you trust me with such a sum?’ I have the fullest trust in the Germans,’ answers the Jew. ‘You took Stalingrad and gave it back; you took Kharkov and gave it back. I’m sure that you will give me back my 20 roubles.’ What is the difference between General Rommel and a watch? A watch goes tick-tock and goes forward; Rommel goes tock-tick and goes backward … What city is the largest in the world? Stalingrad, because it took the Germans months to get from the outskirts to the centre.6”
― Prit Buttar, Centuries Will Not Suffice: A History of the Lithuanian Holocaust

“I don’t know what ‘human nature’ is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest

“Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is a debauchery, a consuming addiction. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina