Antonia

“Is it not better for a man never to have been born?"
"Certaintly not" The response was brisk. "Just to be able to study the sky is reason enough to be alive."
"Unfortunately, I can't see the sky."
"Then listen to music.”
― Gore Vidal, Creation

“Прощавайте, че допускам толкова грешки с пишещата машина. То е, първо, защото ръката ми е изгорена, и второ, не знам защо. Имам следната молба. Не ме поправяйте. Пунктуацията е дъхът на изречението, а моето изречение диша така. Дори да ви се струвам странна, уважете ме. И аз самата съм принудена да се уважавам. Писането е проклятие.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion

“В пълното си право съм да се социализирам както и колкото намеря за добре.”
― Philip Roth, Indignation

“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