Steve Middendorf

“Sometimes I think that I haven’t loved Michele for many years now, that I continue to repeat that phrase out of habit, not noticing that loving feelings no longer exist between us, and have been replaced by others, perhaps equally valid, but completely different. I think again of the anxiety with which I waited for Michele as a fiancé, of the desire we had to be alone, to talk, of the time that went by rapidly, on the thread of looks and words, and of the tedium that now descends when we’re alone together, and no outside distraction, not the radio or the movies, comes to save us.”
― Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook

“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

“This book argues that a very useful concept for understanding how collective memory flows across both time and space is that of circuits of memory. This idea is distinct from Henry Rousso’s conception of “vectors” of memory, which describes institutions and entities that help transmit memory across time; the circuit transmits memory geographically, across national borders, as well as chronologically. Collective memory of war, or of any historical event, is rarely truly global. During the long postwar, several different circuits have emerged in which certain experiences, understandings, and judgments of the Second World War are shared (such as a core purpose of the war being to fight fascism), but the memories within them are distinct and self-contained. One such circuit exists in northwestern Europe and North America, another in Russia and some of its neighbors, a third in Japan, and a fourth in China.”
― Rana Mitter, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism

“If [the Allies] open a second frontline, Germany will definitely lose.” Zhou was prescient: the battle was indeed the turning point, when the Soviet Union began to turn back the Nazi invasion. Yet Zhou still believed that there might be a place for a Japanese-dominated sphere in the postwar world. Rightly suspecting that the Americans and British did not really trust the USSR, he thought they might try and prop up Japanese power to contain the Soviets: “They’ll still allow Germany a certain level of power so as to contain the USSR. Otherwise the whole of Europe and Asia will all be controlled by the Soviet Union . . . so the US, Britain, Germany, and Japan will all have to compromise to face the USSR.”4”
― Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945