S. Quotes

“She wonders what else she will have to give up and what is the minimum of things with which one can survive without losing the feeling that one is human?”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“With a practised hand he pulls out a knife and presses it against her throat. Hurry up, he hisses through clenched teeth, hurry up! At that same instant she is again struck by their inability to express themselves in normal sentences; they use only monosyllabic words, as if they have forgotten how to speak. And perhaps they have. Perhaps that happens to people in wartime, words suddenly become superfluous because they can no longer express reality. Reality escapes the words we know, and we simply lack new words to encapsulate this new experience.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“Here, in the camp, she could tell any old story, these people would have no choice but to believe her. That is not to say that refugee women like her lie, merely that they are uprooted. Their stories barely mean anything even to themselves now. No one listens to them, which is almost like not existing at all.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“war is merely a general term, a collective noun for so many individual stories. War is every individual, it is what happened to that individual, how it happened, how it changed that person’s life. For her, war is this child she had to give birth to.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, As If I Am Not There

“She is awake. Again she thinks about fear. Until then, she had not been aware of fear, she had been convinced that she did not feel fear, not even when they had taken the group of men out from the gym, or when she had heard the burst of gunfire. She listens. She knows now that fear is the absence of all emotion, it is emptiness, it is as if your whole body is drained of blood all at once.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“Her mother, an employee with a state-owned company, is a Serb. Her father, an engineer, is a Muslim, which means that S. is neither one nor the other. That is why S. thinks she is exempt from alignment. This is what she believed until the armed men and soldiers arrived in her mountain village that same day. Now, however, she sees that for her war began the moment others started dividing and labelling her, when nobody asked her anything any more.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“Her body lies in the bed like an inanimate object, an emptied bellow or shopping bag. Nothing has changed with her departure from the camp. Her body is still in their power, even more so now. Only now does S. understand that a woman's body never really belongs to the woman. It belongs to others—to the man, the children, the family. And in wartime to soldiers.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“Žene klimaju glavom, svaka ima nekoliko djece. Jedan dječak ih sluša i kaže: - Kad budem velik, ja ću ubijati Srbe ovako - podiže ruke i cilja kao da puca na nekoga ih velike blizine. Odrasli šute. S. zna da je dječak vidio kako su mu vojnici ubili starijeg brata, baš tako. Toj maloj ruci nedostaje samo oružje, sve je drugo već tu. Svejedno je u koju će zemlju otputovati, ovaj će dječak jednog dana izvršiti svoju namjeru. S. izlazi iz sobe i diše, zrak je oštar poput noža. Jedna je generacija iz te sobe već završila svoj život i svela ga na uspomene. Druga će rasti sa željom da se osveti. Kao da su oni već živi mrtvaci, misli S. Iznenada u ustima osjeća gorčinu.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“During those few days and nights, pain had moved into S. as if into its own house. She felt occupied. A previously unknown illness had entered her and was now eating away at her. S. could not imagine that a man's body could do such damage to a woman, that it was so powerful, so unfairly overpowering that a woman had no defence against such force.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“But the soldiers are no longer people either, except they are less aware of it. they too are prisoners without any individuality, without a face. Their bodies, their willpower belongs to somebody else—to the army, to the leader, to the nation. They obey and execute the orders of people in whom they believe or are afraid of. For a moment, standing there at the doorstep of the 'women's room', they believe that they are something else. The masters. Do they know that they cannot run away from the war, that they cannot hide, that they too can be killed.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“The smell of deathly fear starts spreading from the still living person the moment the entire body knows that this is the end, although the mind keeps on hoping.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“The two women have to tear her from the dead body of her child whom she is clutching to her breast. S. tries to pry away her hands, but the woman is too strong. They wrestle silently for a moment. S. gives up. Why wrest the child away from her? The woman needs time to realise that they are surrounded by death, that this is what the camp fence defines, a demarcated territory where death reigns supreme.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.

“здається, ми зумисно осліпли, гадаючи, що захистимося від жахів війни, якщо не будемо їх бачити. Якщо не будемо на них дивитися”
― Slavenka Drakulić, S.