Jake DeBacher > Recent Status Updates

...you had gentility in your eye like a cinder, and there would be a lot of rubbing, reddening, and irritation before your tears flushed it out.

Life had never been good enough to him for him to wince at its destruction. He told himself that he was indifferent even to his own dissolution. It seemed to him that this indifference was the most that human dignity could achieve...

How could one find the truth of nature in a laboratory?

Self-deprivation, the universal language of heartbreak and remorse.

It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life.

This was how you should love - without fear, without barriers, without thought for the morrow. And then afterwards, without regret.

Is this the effect or the experiment?

We want, very much want, a currency that offers every person who uses it nothing to save, or to spend, or to exchange to the exclusion of someone else, so, in exchange for exchange itself, you take participation.

What moment in the gradual decay Does resurrection choose? What year? What day? Who had the stopwatch? Who reminds the tape? Are some less lucky, or do all escape?

The regular vulgarian, I daresay, Is happier: he sees the Milky Way Only when making water.

...eighteen million Soviet citizens passed through the camps and colonies between 1923 and 1953.... the number of [WWII] POWs exceeded four million... added up the number of special exiles and got a figure of 6,015,000... Adding the numbers together, the total number of forced laborers in the USSR comes to 28.7 million.

According to [Shifrin's] account, he and his comrades were sent directly to the front despite a shortage of weapons: 500 men were given 100 rifles. "Your weapons are in the hands of the Nazis," the officers told them. "Go get them."

In May 1944, 31,000 NKVD officers, soldiers, and operatives completed the entire deportation of 200,000 Tartars in three days, using 100 jeeps, 250 trucks, and 67 trains.

Although mass executions were not as common as they had been in 1937 and 1938, prisoner mortality rates for 1942 and 1943 are nevertheless the highest in the Gulag's history. According to the official statistics, which are almost certainly an underestimate, 352,560 prisoners died in 1942, or one in four. One in five, or 267,826, died in 1943.

Hey, let's face it, here I am just shooting my mouth off again because I am trying to get rid of this boner.

I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.

America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.

In the winter of 1938-1939, after Berzin had been deposed, temperatures had to fall to 60 degrees below zero (F) before work was stopped. Even this rule was not always adhered to, writes Petrov, since the only person at the good field who had a thermometer was the camp commander.

So secret were these voyages considered to be, in fact, that when the Indigirka, a Dalstroi ship containing 1,500 passengers - mostly prisoners returning to the mainland - hit a reed off the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1939, the ship's crew chose to let most of the passengers die rather than seek aid.

In 1940, the prison of Stanislawwow, in newly occupied eastern Poland, contained 1,709 people, well above its capacity of 472, and possessed a mere 150 sets of sheets.

Another ex-prisoner, S. G. Durasova, even claims that he was specifically told, by one of his investigators, that "we never arrest anyone who is not guilty. And even if you weren't guilty, we can't release you, because then people would say that we are picking up innocent people."

So far were these new camps from civilization - so far were they from roads, even, let alone railway lines - that no barbed wire was used in Komi until 1937 [seven years later]. Escape was considered pointless.

When blood does not belong to your kin it might as well be wine or water.

Here, I thought, were two people who agreed on so many things that their opinions automatically took on the appearance of reality.

So are the witches burned, like coal, to warm us.

There are issues at stake, but as too often happens, we are apt to look at to men as symbols rather than to the issues themselves.

Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.

But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate.

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice?