Seppe Sandra > Recent Status Updates

“There were no birds and almost no people. ‘This was a house of fourteen people,’ the teenager said. He had a sprouting black moustache and carried his automatic rifle over his shoulder in an easy, familiar manner. The indifferent way in which he spoke was impressive, setting him apart from the blue-suited propagandist who needed this devastation to prove his point.”

"Tea and Marlboros became the story of the Palestinian revolution. The tea was always sweet, the sugar poured into the pot before the glasses were filled. The cigarettes were always offered with a slight flourish, the packet banged against the palm of the hand to ensure that the tobacco was well packed. It was as if the guerrillas did nothing but fire machine-guns at ridge-lines, drink tea, chain-smoke and sleep."

"Shatila camp has turned into Camp Video. The casettes circulate among the houses, and people sit around their television sets and remember and tell stories. They tell stories about what they see and out of the pictures of villages they build villages. Don't they ever get sick of repeating the same stories? Umm Hassan didn't sleep. She kept telling stories till she died amid her tears."

"At one time, we gathered, people in his country had been fond of reading; currently, however, the only readers of artful fiction were critics, other writers, and unwilling students who, left to themselves, preferred music and pictures to words."

“Do not conclude from this that the nightmare of Fukushima was approaching its end. Cesium-137, a major pollutant, has a half-life of 30.2 years. […]—Why then did the measured radiation decline so rapidly?—Because the cesium had been washed a few centimeters underground, or into rivers, or took up residence in mushrooms and trees.”

"Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived may wonder what you and I were thinking, or whether we thought at all. This book is for them."

"Ammunition, like all life-force, is heavy; a man can carry only so much of it. I didn't dare to count my rounds. This I did know: The weaker I got, the stronger they got. Here came more Russians! I sent them to their second death or got away from them; then their brothers sprouted up, new shoots from moldering onions. I still had my cartridge belt, with a few cartridges ready."