Zvonimir

“Razlog zašto više nisam htio čuti tu stvar nije imao nikakve veze s uspomenama na Šimamoto. Pjesma jednostavno nije više na mene djelovala kao prije. Zašto, ne znam. Ono nešto posebno što sam davno osjetio u toj melodiji sad je nestalo. I dalje je to bila krasna melodija, ali ništa više od toga. A nije mi na pamet padalo da slinim nad mrtvim truplom lijepe pjesme.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Now that Nazism has become “they,” it is easy to distance ourselves from it, but this was not the case when Nazism was “we.” If we are to understand what happened and how it was possible, we must understand this first. And we must understand too that Nazism in its various elements was not monstrous in itself, by which I mean that it did not arise as something obviously monstrous and evil, separate from all else in the current of society, but was on the contrary part of that current. The gas chambers were not a German invention, but were conceived by Americans who realized that people could be put to death by placing them in a chamber infused with poisonous gas, a procedure they carried out for the first time in 1919. Paranoid anti-Semitism was not a German phenomenon either, the world’s most celebrated and passionate anti-Semite in 1925 being not Adolf Hitler but Henry Ford. And racial biology was not an abject, shameful discipline pursued at the bottom of society or its shabby periphery, it was the scientific state of the art, much as genetics is today, haloed by the light of the future and all its hope. Decent humans distanced themselves from all of this, but they were few, and this fact demands our consideration, for who are we going to be when our decency is put to the test? Will we have the courage to speak against what everyone else believes, our friends, neighbors, and colleagues, to insist that we are decent and they are not? Great is the power of the we, almost inescapable its bonds, and the only thing we can really do is to hope our we is a good we. Because if evil comes it will not come as “they,” in the guise of the unfamiliar that we might turn away without effort, it will come as “we.” It will come as what is right.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“The fact is that all the power in the world cannot transform someone who hates you into someone who likes you. It can turn a foe into a slave, but not into a friend. All the power in the world cannot transform a fanatic into an enlightened man. All the power in the world cannot transform someone thirsting for vengeance into a lover.”
― Amos Oz, Judas: Prize-Winning Biblical Romance of Love, Betrayal, and Secrets in 1959 Jerusalem