Steve Middendorf

“There was very heavy fighting. In that fighting we lost many people, and I was wounded. And after the battle came the funeral. Usually we gave short speeches over the grave. First came the commanders, then the friends. But here, among the dead, was a local fellow, and his mother had come to the funeral. She began to lament: “My little son! We prepared the house for you! You promised you would bring a young wife home! But you are marrying the earth…” The unit stood there, silent, no one touched her. Then she lifted her head and saw that not only her son had been killed, but many other young ones were lying there, and she began to cry over those other sons: “My sons, my dear ones! Your mothers don’t see you, they don’t know you’re being put in the ground! And the ground is so cold. The winter cold is cruel. I will weep instead of them, and pity all of you…My dear ones…Darlings…” She just said, “I will pity all of you” and “my dear ones”—all the men began weeping aloud. No one could help it, no one had strength enough. The unit wept. Then the commander shouted, “Fire the salute!” And the salute silenced everything. And I was so struck that I think of it even now, the greatness of a mother’s heart. In such great grief, as her son was buried, she had enough heart to mourn for the other sons…Mourn for them like her own…”
― Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

“The burden of getting older was borne alone, but also as if by someone else, because he often couldn’t recognise bits of himself he caught in the mirror. Whose newly scrawny legs were those? Why was his head sitting further forward on his neck? Was it really kind of the gods to do this to the skin of his face, as if a child had been let loose with a brown marker?”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

“The Party isn’t an army squadron, it’s an apparatus. A machine. A bureaucratic machine. They rarely hired people who’d studied the humanities, the Party hadn’t trusted them since Lenin’s times. Of the intellectual class, Lenin wrote, “It’s not the brains of the nation—it’s the shit.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“As if the Irish weather were his adversary. Which it was, in its way, the Irish weather, which would so rarely play ball with the plans of citizens. All public holidays were guaranteed to be rainswept, stem to stern. It was a given of Irish life. A trip to the beach, begun in blazing sunshine, would inevitably end in shivering tears, in sudden storms, in lids of cloud. How often the Irish person, of whatever age or sex, had lain on his or her towel, on any beach in Ireland, body stiffening with the assault of the cold, waiting for the cloud cover to pass away, and the gladsome sun to pour down again. Soon the shivering passes to convulsions, to an epilepsy of exposure. The victim quails, squints up at the sky with one eye, because there is a glare even in the cloud, trying to make a judgement. Should I stay or should I go? Is there any point in lying here, as gradually death seems a desirable thing?”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time