Katia N

“Стає темно. Потім знов блискавка і видно, як ті - ж берестки з розмаху нахиляються до землі, мов бажаючи щось з неї підняти, й, не діставши, одкидаються назад, злісно, безсило тріпочуть кучерявими віттями й знов розхитуються... А старі дуби стоять, стогнуть і неначе з жалем і тугою хитають головами на силкування молодіжи. А там, на мосту, над головою, здається, злетілись дві величезні армії й скажено бʼються. Грюкіт гармат, тупотіння коней, несамовите ревіння, все мішається в страшенний, дужий концерт, де можна чути й шепотіння пекельної злости, й грюкіт гніву. А виття болю й ненависти, й страх, й дужий, радісний поклик до бою й повне одчаю й муки знесилля. Бій не змовкає й кров потоками дощу ллеться на ліс, прориває листя, стікає на бричку й починає капати за шию й на голову…”
― Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Контрасти

“In the U.S. election of 1860, the New York Herald's owner James Gordon Bennett Sr. warned the white workers of New York, "... if Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“What Beckett is dramatising here is a quite different view of the notion that man is the storytelling animal. What he is showing is that we may indeed have an innate capacity to tell stories, but that far from this being the royal road to truth it is simply a way of avoiding the truth, of avoiding the sense that something nameless is taking its course, that our lives are passing us by, that we are moving inexorably towards a death we do not understand or want and certainly do not know how to cope with.

But what does that do to the feeling that something nameless is taking its course, something that needs to be dealt with that otherwise will drive him mad? This, it seems to me, is the paradox that lies at the heart of all modern art: the need to speak of that which cannot be uttered, together with the recognition that the utterance perverts or destroys the thing that needed to be spoken of.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale: Essays on Literature and Culture

“a situation developed that had no clear beginning or end. It emerged and flowered and receded again over a day or a handful of days. He was old enough now to know that these situations, these flowering, which in youth seem almost identical to the forward-driving story of life, in fact turn out to be life itself. It was in these moments of hope and expectation and disillusion, of prelude, before the will decides to conscript the self into conformity, that they really lived.”
― Rachel Cusk, Parade