Benjamin

“But your wife is dead,” said Reiter. “I had a son and a daughter,” Reiter heard him whisper, “but they died too. My son in the battle of Kursk and my daughter during a bombing raid on Hamburg.” “Don’t you have any other relatives?” asked Reiter. “Two little grandchildren, twins, a girl and a boy, but they died in the same raid.” “Good God,” said Reiter. “My son-in-law died too, not in the raid, but days later, from sorrow at the death of his wife and children.” “That’s terrible,” said Reiter. “He killed himself by taking rat poison,” whispered Zeller in the dark. “He suffered agonies for three days before he died.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“As we know and have always known, there is in this country a vast and inveterate minority (about 35 per cent) whose sympathies lie not with the silently studious protestors, in Greensboro, but with the rejectionists yelling in their ears and pouring sodas on their heads and then beating them to the ground; not with six-year-old Ruby Bridges, in New Orleans, but with the hate-warped face of the housewife in the picket line brandishing a black doll in a toy coffin. …Is”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“In the days leading up to the passage of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act of 2010), I listened on the radio to ‘a town hall’. ‘I happen to be an American,’ said a woman in the audience, her voice yodelling and hiccuping with emotion, ‘and I don’t want to live in a country like the Soviet Union!’ Or, she might have said, a country (at last) beginning (at least) to emulate Canada, Australia, and all the constituent states of the EU. But in the US saying ‘like Europe’, or ‘like England’, or ‘like France’, or ‘like Switzerland’, is the rough equivalent of saying ‘like the Soviet Union’ – which disappeared for ever in 1991.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“As far as I can tell, every family produces its solitary misfit, its psychotic mirror image of all the ghosts summoned out of the small or large hells of childhood, the spiller of the apple cart, the jack of spades, the black-hearted knight, the shit stirrer, the sibling with the uncontrollable tongue, the father brutal by habit, the uncle who tried to feel up his nieces, the aunt too neurotic ever to leave home.”
― Pat Conroy, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son