Pavlo > Recent Status Updates

“Lamb put [the loose change] in the cup and jiggled it, so the coins splashed against each other. Then he opened the door. ‘If I’m not back in twenty minutes, do something.’
‘.. Like what?’
‘Well I don’t fucking know, do I? Google ‘cunning plan,’ see what the internet suggests.’”

“Symptoms included a tendency to lapse into capitals, the dismissal of all dissent as Establishment toadying, and a blinding ignorance of Occam’s razor”

“In the very best of cases, the object of affection wooed herself.”

“its only promise that of an escape from one empty place into another, which is all the future seems to offer to Louisa; one empty space after another, like an infinity of mirrors reaching all the way to nowhere.”

“… and perhaps it’s that future occupation that causes Louisa to gently sob now, or perhaps it’s the current emptiness awaiting her at her flat, which once seemed too small for two, and is now too large for one…”

“At the bar he ordered a large scotch for himself, because he wanted to give the impression of being kind of a lush, and also because he wanted a large scotch.”

“Min didn’t lumber about, but didn’t have to: the mere fact of his presence brought the walls nearer. It was nice to be close to him, but it would have been nicer to be close somewhere spacious enough to be further apart.”

“What enormous things must have happened, River sometimes thought, to make sure that nothing ever changed.”

“Bob Ricks has been one of the FBI’s most outspoken critics of the Waco siege, and he all but single-handedly prevented a similar raid occurring on a group of white supremacists in Northern Oklahoma, at a place called Elohim City. I don’t think that Bob Ricks was lying during the press conference. I think the FBI’s left hand didn’t know what its right hand was up to.”

“But there is a more disturbing parallel. David Koresh’s Branch Davidians also seem to have been considered guinea pigs in the midst of a long-awaited golden opportunity, an opportunity to try stuff out.”

“Much of the Iraqi population had been fed similarly wild conspiracy theories about American imperialistic hedonism—that the United States was violently out of control and determined to force it’s corruption and decadence on the devout—and Abu Ghraib was the place where those conspiracy theories came true.”

There is something far too familiar … about the whole thing. At Waco, just as at Abu Ghraib, the US government behaved like a grotesque caricature of itself. The anti-big-government American right-wing had harboured paranoid fantasies about the Clinton administration heavy-handedly destroying the lives of simple people who wanted to live free, and Waco was the place where those conspiracy theories came true.

“Jamal seemed fine when I met him in Manchester. I asked him if he felt at all unusual after listening to Matchbox Twenty and he said no. But one shouldn’t read too much into this. There is a very strong chance, given the history of the goat staring and the wall walking and so on, that they blasted Jamal with silent sounds and it just didn’t work.”

“But if a psychiatrist has no formal training in the dynamics of child sexual abuse or family violence, isn’t that exactly like getting a carpenter to do your dental work? If you haven’t specifically studied the counterintuitive traits of family violence and child sexual «abuse, how can you claim expertise on that subject – such that you can provide expert evidence in court?”

“She senses – but dares not believe – the possibility of an alternative future. These moments must be seized immediately. If they are missed, her belief that nobody can help her is confirmed. The fog closes back in, and she slips underground again, where the abuse continues, unseen.”

She senses – but dares not believe – the possibility of an alternative future. These moments must be seized immediately.

“I guess no one’s even thought about that,’ said the general. ‘That’s probably an untested set of waters from a Geneva Convention perspective”

“I clenched the wheel, raging silently at all the murderous men with their pathetic nihilism and their raging entitlement”

“Military acronyms are truly mesmerizing”

You’re telling me!

О, знову ввімкнулася редакторська колонка про сучасну Україну і війну. Ну, книжка хороша, але такі штуки не додають їй нічого