frisco - فریسکو

“The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion—but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led.”
― Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family

“A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“But I am I. And I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind”
― Jack London, Martin Eden

“So what was in this building before historical materialism?'

'Before what?'

'You know, back then, under the old regime?'

'Oh. Under the old regime my master lived here.'

'A bourgeois?'

'You're a bourgeois yourself! He wasn't a bourgeois. He was a marshal of the nobility.'

'So he was a proletarian, then?'

'You're a proletarian yourself! I told you loud and clear, a marshal.'

The conversation with the clever dvornik with a vague understanding of the class structure of society would have lasted god knows how long if the young man hadn't made a decisive move.”
― Ilya Ilf, The Twelve Chairs