In The Company Of Men by Véronique Tadjo
~We are the trees. Our roots run all the way down to the heart of the earth, and we can feel the beat of her pulse. We inhale her breath. We taste her flesh. We live and die in the exact same spot, never moving from the land we occupy. Both prisoners and conquerors of time, we stand riveted to the ground yet soaring upward, reaching for the clouds…We are the link between Man and his past, his present, and his unpredictable future.~
~Pity is a death sentence.~
~Yes, by the time they’re dying they’re no longer children.~
~It’s no use our knowing that all paths lead to death, that life is but a stage, that eternity’s the road to nowhere, that Man must die in order to ripen in the memory of his descendants; the evidence is nonetheless irrefutable: Death is not pretty.~
~But being admitted to a hospital is like entering some kind of underworld. Everything goes dark. You become disorientated. There’s nothing left except inside and outside. Time’s your master, its power is absolute, and you must submit. You must wait for your organism to recover its balance and regain the place it lost.~
~It’s time for people to realise something: they aren’t good, they’ve never been good…Everything rots. Everything disintegrates. Everything merges with the the ground.~
