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peytonaaa's Reviews (927)
informative
reflective
"The army shooting at everything that moves, to crush dissent. And not just
the army, mind you, there were settlers and militiamen as well, hand in glove, all dancing the same damn jig. Death is one thing, but humiliation goes deeper, gets under the skin, it plants little seeds of anger and screws up whole generations; I remember a story someone told me, it happened in Melbou, there's no blood but maybe it's worse, blood dries faster than shame: they forced some Arabs to kneel before our flag and say We are dogs, Ferhat Abbas is a dog. Abbas is one of their leaders and still, he's a moderate, wears a tie, doesn't even demand complete independence, he just wants justice..."
the army, mind you, there were settlers and militiamen as well, hand in glove, all dancing the same damn jig. Death is one thing, but humiliation goes deeper, gets under the skin, it plants little seeds of anger and screws up whole generations; I remember a story someone told me, it happened in Melbou, there's no blood but maybe it's worse, blood dries faster than shame: they forced some Arabs to kneel before our flag and say We are dogs, Ferhat Abbas is a dog. Abbas is one of their leaders and still, he's a moderate, wears a tie, doesn't even demand complete independence, he just wants justice..."
emotional
mysterious
reflective
"Though he is on death's door at my hands, when I scream inside my head, there is a glint of recognition in his face.
He hears me. In here. He hears me in here."
He hears me. In here. He hears me in here."
reflective
"For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve—then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging."
In a way this is the perfect complement to the Thomas Mann story collection I read recently (at the very beginning the narrator reads Death in Venice and longs to be like poor little Tadzio, the prototype for his persistent and elusive fantasy of erotic power (which is not really any power at all) over adult men.)
In a way this is the perfect complement to the Thomas Mann story collection I read recently (at the very beginning the narrator reads Death in Venice and longs to be like poor little Tadzio, the prototype for his persistent and elusive fantasy of erotic power (which is not really any power at all) over adult men.)
mysterious
"It was all that was left of my past life, when I had been young and personable, the blood had coursed in my veins, everything was ahead, everything was then and now, there was no yesterday or tomorrow, and now there is no time at all, tomorrow is not a word I can pronounce, there is no now really, and yesterday I never think of except as dance music. All I have is the letters, the applicants, and the dance hall, and none of them is real. I do not even believe in death because what I am is emptier than death itself."
mysterious
reflective
"The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them."
emotional
reflective
"Our trip to meet him in Bethlehem in the summer of 1994 remained a significant memory for me, pregnant with meaning and revelation, largely because it was my first contact with a very particular range of emotion – and now I hated myself for treating experience like this, like a colour palette. The vanished possibility of Rashid’s life was appalling. It shoved me violently from the centre of my world to its edges. What I thought had happened was totally wrong, it was clashing against the reality, which had carried on without me, without my awareness. Or, rather, had not carried on at all. There was I, taking it for granted that his life had kept on going, when in fact I’d met him at the end of it. There had been no thereafter."
funny
mysterious
reflective
"And I cursed the very solitude I longed for because I didn’t want to be alone yet couldn’t stand anything but being alone. I hated it and needed it, both at once, or at intervals, I’m not sure which, both the solitude and the discomfort I felt in my solitude, but, in any event, life became unfathomable and was this, I wondered, the suffering one experiences before achieving clarity and wisdom? Was madness the precursor to enlightenment?"
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
"If we must have an animal as a national symbol, why not a pangolin, something original that we can own. Like many Sri Lankans pangolins have big tongues, thick hides and small brains. They pick on ants, rats and anything smaller than them. They hide in terror when faced with bullies and get up to mischief when the lights are out. They are hundreds of thousands of years old and are plodding towards extinction."
emotional
mysterious
reflective
"Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others, and since all the women have died, it only affects the scrawny plants growing between the stones and producing, occasionally, just enough flowers to make a single seed which will fall a little way off – not far because the wind is never strong – where it may or may not germinate. The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women?"