Maya’s Reviews > Homage to Catalonia > Status Update

Inside, the place was a huge complicated warren running round a central courtyard, with hundreds of offices on each floor; and, as this was Spain, nobody had the vaguest idea where the office I was looking for was.

In Barcelona, during all those last weeks I spent there, there was a peculiar evil feeling in the air—an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred.

real

“But I still believe that-unless Spain splits up, with unpredictable consequencesthe tendency of the post-war Government is bound to be Fascistic. Once again I let this opinion stand, and take the chance that time will do to me what it does to most prophets.”

good news and bad news…

There were Andalusians next to us in the line now… they had run away from Malaga so fast that they had forgotten to stop at Valencia; but this, of course, came from the Catalans, who professed to look down on the Andalusians as a race of semi-savages. Certainly the Andalusians were very ignorant… they seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in Spain—which political party they belonged to.

"Orders. Back to our own lines double-quick."
newspeak ahh

Sometimes, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans he simply told the Fascists how much better we were fed than they were.
His account of the Government rations was apt to be a little imaginative. 'Buttered toast!'-you could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley— We're just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!'

They say it takes a thousand bullets to kill a man, and at this rate it would be twenty years before I killed my first Fascist.

this book is rly funny

Goodness knows how many times the Spanish standard of marksmanship has saved my life.
Nothing will convince a Spaniard, at least a young Spaniard, that fire-arms are dangerous...
"Don't fire," I said half-jokingly as I focused the camera.
"Oh, no, we won't fire."
The next moment there was a frightful roar and a stream of bullets tore past my face so close that my cheek was stung by grains of cordite.

"This is not a war," he used to say, "it is a comic opera with an occasional death."

i can just imagine blanca ripoll saying ts