The Last Hundred Days Quotes

“You know the old joke: with communism the future is certain, it’s just the past that keeps changing?”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“The waiter came over to ask if all is delicious. As we have not yet ordered, it is certainly the perfect time to enquire.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“Life in a police state magnifies the small mercies that it leaves alone until they become disproportionate to their significance; at the same time it banalises the worst travesties into mere routine.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“Diplomacy : the ability to stare the future in the face without meeting its eye.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“family life had been a good enough schooling in totalitarianism, eking out small permissions, learning to live under the radar of his vengefulness and failure. There can’t have been many people who came to Ceauşescu’s Romania for their first taste of freedom.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“What I learned from her was that when the strong break they break irrecoverably because they never cracked, because they never accommodated themselves to what sought to destroy them.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days

“Kafka’s The Castle came to mind, a book I had not read but that fell into that category of literature that culture reads on your behalf and deposits somewhere inside you.”
― Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days