Julia’s Reviews > Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead > Status Update

Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us.

“I’ll marry her when she gets out of jail”

What’s going to become of them? How will these children cope? And how will I cope? After all, I’m like them too. My life’s harvest is not the building material for anything, neither in my time, now, or in any other, never.

(I wonder how many people read the astrology bits :)

But to him I was just an old woman, gone off her rocker living in the wilderness. Useless and unimportant.

2/2 The people there are capable of discussing things calmly and nobody quarrels with anyone else. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t, because their language isn’t suited to quarrelling.

No, no, people in our country don’t have the ability to club together to form a community, not even under the banner of the penny bun. This is the land of neurotic egoists, each of whom, as soon as he finds himself among others, starts to instruct, criticise, offend, and show off his undoubted superiority.
I think in the Czech Republic it’s totally different. 1/2

And then, knowing that his German wife had trouble pronouncing her own new surname, driven by some vengeful emotion that’s quite incomprehensible nowadays, the engineer gave his son the old-fashioned Slavic name Świętopełk.

For several days I missed him very much… He called every day. Then less often… I calmly watched as the image of Borio, entomologist and taphonomist, faded and evaporated, until all that was left of him was a little grey pigtail hanging in mid-air, ridiculous. Everything will pass.

We were sitting in the orchard under an old apple tree on which the apples were already fruiting. The orchard was fragrant and soughed in the wind. I had lost my sense of time, and each break between utterances seemed endless. Great gulf of time opened before us. We chattered the whole centuries, talking non-stop about the same thing over and over.