Antonia

“I knew both from personal experience and by the example of many of my comrades that fighting in a war has an irreparably destructive effect on almost any man. I knew also that the constant proximity of death, the sight of the killed, wounded, dying, hanged and shot, the great red flame in the icy air above blazing villages on a winter’s night, the carcass of a man’s horse and those auditory impressions - the alarm bell, shell explosions, the whistle of bullets, the desperate, unknown cries – none of this ever passes with impunity. I knew that the silent, almost unconscious memory of war haunts the majority of people who have gone through it, leaving something broken in them once and for all. I knew myself that the normal, human ideas regarding the value of life and the necessity for a basic moral code – not to kill, not to steal, not to rape, to show compassion – had been slowly reasserted within me after the war, but they had lost their former persuasiveness and had become merely a system of theoretical morality, with whose correctness and necessity I couldn’t, in principle, disagree. Those feelings that ought to have been inside me and that were a condition of the re-establishment of this code had been razed by war; they no longer existed, and there was nothing to take their place.”
― Gaito Gazdanov, Het fantoom van Alexander Wolf

“Никой от никого не се стесняваше; най-красивите момичета не се срамуваха да влязат под ръка със смолисточерен негър или тесноок китаец в най-близкия малък хотел – кой го беше грижа в Париж за тези едва по-късно разтръбени лозунги плашила, като раса, класа, произход? Можеше да ходиш, да разговаряш, да спиш с когото или с която ти се нрави и да не даваш пет пари за другите.”
― Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers

“I believe that architecture today needs to reflect on the task and possibilities which are inherently its own. Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings, and speak its own language.”
― Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture

“Architecture has its own realm. It has a special physical relationship with life. I do not think of it primarily as either a message or a symbol, but as an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep.”
― Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture