Jeff

“The future! The future! The work of the future will be to efface the present and to efface it more than we think, to efface it as something abominable and shameful. And yet this present was necessary! Necessary! Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier's profession, which change men, some into stupid victims, others into base executioners. Yes, shame, that's true--but it's too true, it's true in eternity, but not yet for us. Take care of what we think now. It will be true when there will be a whole, true bible. It will be true when it is written among other truth that a purified mind will allow us to grasp at the same time. We are still lost, exiled, a long way from that future time. In these present days, in these moments, the truth is almost an error, nothing more: this holy word is mere blasphemy!”
― Henri Barbusse, Under Fire

“[T]he moral seemed to be that one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments.”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Old Mortality

“But if you could not close a door behind you to take a shit in the city--even if it was just the door to a shared toilet--if this one, most essential freedom was taken from you, the freedom, that is, to withdraw from other people when necessity called, then all other freedoms were worthless. Then life had no more meaning. Then it would be better to be dead.”
― Patrick Süskind, The Pigeon

“But that’s the thing. You can play one part in life, but you can’t be that thing. You just playing it. You’re not real. I was a Negro above all else, and Negroes plays their part, too: Hiding. Smiling. Pretending bondage is okay till they’re free, and then what? Free to do what? To be like the white man? Is he so right? Not according to the Old Man. It occurred to me then that you is everything you are in this life at every moment. And that includes loving somebody. If you can’t be your own self, how can you love somebody? How can you be free? That pressed on my heart like a vice right then. Just mashed me down.”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird