Nina’s Reviews > Human Acts > Status Update

“Later, your middle brother explained that your face was so white because of all the blood you'd lost when they shot you. And that that was why the coffin barely weighed a thing. Not just because you were such a little slip of a thing.”

“The door leading back to that summer has been slammed shut; you've made sure of that. But that means that the way is also closed which might have led back to the time before. There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre.”

“Just like the face of the man with
blood dripping from his jaw, his eyes half closed .. etched into the insides of my eyelids. Inside, where I can't get at it. Where I'll never be able to scrape it
off.”

“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat?

“Empty eyes framed by
long, thick lashes, peering into the bottom of the soup as though its oily swirls of black oxblood were congealing to form a riddle, one whose answer would remain impenetrable.”
Crying

“Empty eyes framed by
long, thick lashes, peering into the bottom of the soup as though its oily swirls of black oxblood were congealing to form a riddle, one whose answer would remain impenetrable.”

“If life was the summer that had just gone by, if life was a body sullied with sweat and bloody pus, clotted seconds that refused to pass, if life was a mouthful of sour bean sprouts that only served to intensify the hunger pangs, then perhaps death would be like a clean brushstroke, erasing all such things in a single sweep.”

“I'd been standing in the middle of the column of the demonstrators, but when the bullets came flying, I turned and ran. That sublime feeling that I'd been tapping into, that enormous heart I'd felt briefly a part of, was smashed to pieces, strewn over the ground as so much rubbish.”

“I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean ... the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.”

“I looked on in silence as my face blackened and swelled, my features turned into festering ulcers, the contours that had defined me, that had given me clear edges, crumbled into ambiguity, leaving nothing that could be recognised as me.”