Quinn > Recent Status Updates

If I got thirsty in school, then I had to stand near the hand pump. (Ref #7 he had to stand near the pump and wait for someone from another caste who could touch the pump to notice and give him water. If an untouchable touched the hand pump, it would need “purification” before the other castes could use it.

“Although the doors of government schools had begun to open for untouchables, the mentality of the ordinary people had not changed much. I had to sit away from the others in the class, and even that wasn’t enough. I was not allowed even to sit on a chair or a bench. I had to sit on the bare floor; I was not even allowed to sit on the mat. Sometimes I’d have to sit way behind everybody, right near the door.”

“I asked mom one time how to fix the bed so it was covered up like you see them on TV, which she thought was dead hilarious.”

“People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harms way, and them saying bless your heart.”

“Drugs and guns were as normal in my life as cartoons are in the life of an average child. I knew how to cook crack and had witnessed this several times by age 12. I was raised in the projects by teenagers who feared nothing and only respected violence and money ninety percent of all the people I looked up to, respected, loved or knew were incarcerated.”

“This was her reality; she worked hard every day, but if she had no money left after paying her bills, she had to heat her house with boiling water.”

“The most primitive, even the wildest feelings were not directed at the enemy; their bloody task was merely an irradiation of the soul, of the soul divided within itself, which filled them with the lust to rage and kill, annihilate and die so that they might be born anew.”

“I remembered civil servants in my hometown, worthy old gentleman who cling to the memories of their drunken university days as to keepsakes from paradise and fashioned a filter of their “vanished” student years as poets or other romantics fashion their childhood. Everywhere they looked for “freedom” and “luck” in the past, out of sheer dread of their present responsibilities and future course.”

.. no longer valid, that they live according to archaic laws - neither their religion nor their mortality is in any way suited to the needs of the present. For a hundred years or more Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill a man but they don’t know how to be happy for a single contended hour.”

“The community spirit at present is only a manifestation of the herd instinct. Men fly into each others arms because they are afraid of each other… and why are they afraid? You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them! They all sense that the rules they live by are…

“Sooner or later each of us must take the step that separates him from his father, from his mentors; each of us must have some cruelly lonely experience - even if most people cannot take much of this and soon crawl back.”

“The person whom you would like to do away with is of course never Mr. X but merely a disguise. If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”

“We become acquainted with that state of mind in which we are unable to decide whether the images on our retina are the result of impressions coming from without or from within.”

“The surrender to natures irrational, strangely confused formations produced in us a feeling of inner harmony with the force responsible for these phenomena. We soon fall prey to the temptation of thinking of them as being our own moods, creations, and see the boundaries separating us from nature begin to quiver and dissolve.”

“It was all as if I were somehow under a compulsion to do these things. I simply did what I had to do, because I had no idea what to do with myself otherwise. I was afraid of being alone for long, was afraid of the many..moods that would overcome me.”

“..I felt something like liberation amid my misery.”

“Often I felt a great longing for Max Denison, but no less often I hated him, accusing him of having caused the impoverishment of my life that held me in its sway like a foul disease.”

“My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last years secondhand goods, insipid, all it’s charm gone.”

“Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet.”

“Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.”

“I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”

“I realize that some people wont believe that a child of little more than 10yrs is capable of having such feelings. My story is not intended for them. I am telling it to those who have a better knowledge of man. The adult who has learned to translate a part of his feelings into thoughts notices the absence of these thoughts in a child, and therefore comes to believe that the child lacks these experiences too.”

“It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself. The inner, the essential line of our fate consists of such invisible experiences. Such fissures and rents grow together again, heal and are forgotten, but in the most secret recesses they continue to live and bleed.”

“A strange new feeling overcame me at this point, a feeling that stung pleasurably: I felt superior to my father! Momentarily I felt a certain loathing for his ignorance… it was an odious, hostile feeling, but it was strong and deeply attractive, and shackled me more than anything else to my secret and my guilt.”