but apart from when I was ill or hurt I felt for the most part as though my body didn’t really exist. I lived, I suppose, in my head: thinking, imagining or worrying. Yet other people had bodies that were them, it seemed to me – that spoke
...more
“I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.”
― Ghost Wall
― Ghost Wall
“He (Antonio Machado) was old, weary and ill, and he no longer believed in Franco's defeat. He wrote 'This is the end; any day now Barcelona will fall. For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, it is all clear: we have lost the war. But in human terms, I am not so sure. Perhaps we have won.”
― Soldados de Salamina
― Soldados de Salamina
“Survival without renunciation of any part of one’s own moral world – apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune – was conceded only to very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and saints.”
― If This Is A Man/The Truce: 'Miraculous' Philippe Sands
― If This Is A Man/The Truce: 'Miraculous' Philippe Sands
Richard Hoare’s 2025 Year in Books
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