Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"“So, where is God?” And Bonhoeffer, who is a theologian, points to the hanged men swinging in the dawn light: “There.” A few days later, it is his turn."

"The sun shone at night, the dead fled their graves, every clown was king, the insane wrote the laws, the beggars were lords, and the ladies gave off sparks. And in the end, when Ash Wednesday arrived, people pulled off their masks, which did not lie, and put on their faces until next year."

"one studious fellow came to the conclusion that no coup d’état ever occurs in the United States because it has no U.S. Embassy."

"The invaders call Sandino a “bandit.” He appreciates the joke: “So George Washington was a bandit? He fought for the same thing.”"

"Bernardo Soares, master of the paradox, prose poet, scholar, who claimed to be an unwilling aide in some library, wrote contradictions.

And Antonio Mora, psychiatrist and nutcase, interned at Cascais, wrote lucubrations and locobrations.

Pessoa also wrote. When the others slept."

"Alberto Caeiro, pagan, mocker of metaphysics and other intellectual acrobatics that reduce life to concepts, wrote burps.

Ricardo Reis, monarchist, Hellenist, child of classical culture, who was born several times and had several astrological signs, wrote constructions.

Álvaro de Campos, engineer from Glasgow, vanguardist, who studied energy and feared losing his zest for life, wrote sensations."

"He was one, he was many, he was everyone, he was no one. Fernando Pessoa, sad bureaucrat, prisoner of the clock, solitary author of love letters never sent, carried an insane asylum around inside himself.

Of the denizens, we know their names, the dates and even hours of their births, their astrological signs, weights, and heights.

And their works, because they were all poets."

"“I never stop acting,” she said. “Always and everywhere, in all sorts of places, at every instant. I am my own double.”"

"Isaac Babel was an outlawed writer, He explained: “It’s a new genre I’ve invented: silence.”"

'For what you did or what you would do, as punishment or just in case, Stalin sacrificed those who cast a shadow on him, those who said no, those who did not say yes, those who were dangerous today, and those who would be dangerous tomorrow."

"and that the steamy climate did not encourage lawbreaking, for the crime rate did not rise in summer."

"Another Japanese, Sei Shōnagon, shared with Murasaki the rare honor of being praised a millennium after the fact. Her The Pillow Book gave birth to the zuihitsu genre, which means literally “brush drippings.” It is a multicolored mosaic made up of short stories, notes, reflections, news items, poems. These seemingly random fragments invite us to penetrate that time and place."

"A thousand years ago, two Japanese women wrote as if it were today. According to Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar, no one ever wrote a better novel than The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu’s masterful tale of masculine adventure and feminine humiliation."

"He repudiated the false erudition called civilization, and he demanded: “No more robes or epaulettes.”"

"At fifty-four, he gets a job in Buffalo Bill’s show. In the circus ring, Sitting Bull plays Sitting Bull. Hollywood is not yet Hollywood, but tragedy is already being repeated as farce."

"Two hundred and nine blacks and one Englishman died.

The colonel took as a souvenir the horn the enemy blew to sound the alarm. And that spiral-shaped horn from a kudu antelope was incorporated into Boy Scout ritual as the symbol of boys who love nature."

"Gifted in the art of following the tracks of others and erasing his own, Baden-Powell was a great success at the sport of hunting lions, boars, deer, Zulus, Ashantis, and Ndebeles.

Against the Ndebeles, he fought a rough battle in southern Africa."

"Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted, and not for the merits of Sherlock Holmes. The writer was invited to join the ranks of the nobility as thanks for the propaganda he wrote for the imperial cause.

One of his heroes was Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. They met while fighting savages in Africa: “There was always something of the sportsman in his keen appreciation of war,” Sir Arthur said."

"Drugs posed no dilemma. Victorian morals did not address the question. The queen was not about to spit in her own plate. The epoch that bears her name forbade passion, but sold consolation."

"Writer Joseph Conrad, however, did. And in Heart of Darkness, his best-known novel,"

"“When it is everyone’s fault, it is no one’s,” she liked to say."

"So it was throughout the Americas, from north to south. All our countries were born of a lie. Independence disowned those who had risked their lives fighting for her, and women, poor people, Indians, and blacks were not invited to the party. The constitutions draped that travesty in the prestige of legality."

"To make students recite by rote what they do not understand is like training parrots. Teach children to be curious so they learn to obey their own minds rather than obeying authorities the way the narrow-minded do, or obeying custom the way the stupid do. He who knows nothing, anyone can fool. He who has nothing, anyone can buy."

"If you are going to imitate everything, imitate originality!"

"“The discovery of a new dish contributes more to human happiness than that of a new star.”"

"+ the Cuban insists that dying for the fatherland is living, the Ecuadorian shows that the holocaust of heroes is a fertile seed, the Peruvian exults in the terror its cannons inspire, the Mexican recommends soaking the fatherland’s standards in waves of blood, and the Colombian bathes itself in the blood of heroes who with geographic enthusiasm do battle at Thermopylae."

"In Latin America, these paeans to the glories of the founding fathers sound like they were written for funeral pageants: the Uruguayan anthem invites us to choose between country and grave and the Paraguayan between the republic and death, the Argentine exhorts us to vow to die with glory, the Chilean proclaims the country’s land will be the grave of the free, the Guatemalan calls for victory or death, +"

"Generally speaking, anthems reinforce the identity of each nation by means of threats, insults, self-praise, homages to war, and the honorable duty to kill and be killed."

"Tresses and attire ate up nearly all the time and energy of the aristocracy. Any left over was spent at banquets. All that sacrifice was exhausting. The French Revolution did not meet much resistance when it swallowed the feast and crushed the wigs and crinolines."

"He was an independent artist when independence was a rare feat, and it cost him dearly. In punishment for his freedom, he died suffocated by debt: the world owed him for so much music, yet he died owing."