“All of us who are living are dying. The only ones not dying are the dead.,,To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one's own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living.”
― The Sympathizer
― The Sympathizer
“If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else's play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn't come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn't taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said , Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?”
― The Sympathizer
― The Sympathizer
“She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.”
― The Sympathizer
― The Sympathizer
“Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.” Still,”
― The Sympathizer
― The Sympathizer
“I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.”
― The Sympathizer
― The Sympathizer
Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award
— 9 members
— last activity Sep 15, 2011 01:27PM
This group will discuss the selections for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. The winner will receive £30,000, whi ...more
Stuart’s 2025 Year in Books
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