The Crack Quotes

“The door opened with a creak, admitting a draft that stirred the air without refreshing it. The woman who entered was tall, commanding the space without effort, her presence a disruption in the grey uniformity. Long, coppery hair fell in rich, wavy cascades, textured as if tended with care from a bygone era; drowned in treatments and rich oils, evoking old TikTok reels of effortless glamour, a relic of abundance. Her lips were a vivid red, bold against the pallor of the day, and her eyes gleamed green, sharp with intent. She scanned the room once, then approached Nia's table, her movements fluid, accented by the subtle click of boots on worn tile and hugged her...
... Colonel Yelena Kuznetsova smelled nice, a fragrance of jasmine and sandalwood that evoked women before the war, polished and unscarred. Like a glitch in the matrix, a type of person that didn't exist anymore: curated, soft, vibrant, untarnished by the grind. And there Nia was, dark brown hair hanging lifelessly over her shoulders in messy cascades, grown out without trimming from a close shave that spoke of practicality over vanity; dressed in the same orange hoodie and leather jacket worn most of the time, smelling of coffee, rust, and ink. Her eyes were pale blue and tired, undereye bags taking more space than brows and eyes together, and her lips had not seen a Chapstick in a while, cracked from the persistent chill and humidity.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack

“In vacuum,” he said evenly, “anything loose becomes hazard.”
“It is not loose,” Shirin replied without looking up.
Sergei hesitated. His English was good. Cautius. “I mean no disrespect. But after revolution… after blood… I thought perhaps…” He gestured vaguely toward her head. “This would be… gone.”
... “You thought,” she said carefully, “we rebelled against God?”
Sergei frowned. “You rebelled against a regime that used God.”
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”
A quiet settled over the chamber.
Shirin stepped close. “The uprising was not a war against faith. It was a war against corruption wearing holy language like armour.” Her voice was steady, but heat threaded through it now. “Men who quoted scripture while stealing futures. Men who invoked God to justify prisons.”
Farhad crossed his arms, gaze fixed somewhere beyond the wall.
Azadeh’s voice cut in once, low and precise. “We buried friends. Do not confuse what we buried.”
Sergei held her gaze. “In Russia,” he said slowly, “religion was tool also. Then it was forbidden. Then it returned as tool again. We are… suspicious of it.”
“That is fair,” Shirin said. The edge softened but did not disappear. “Be suspicious of power. Be suspicious of men. But do not assume that cloth on my head belongs to them.”
She touched the edge of her hijab lightly. “This is mine.” There was no defiance in the gesture. Only ownership. “You think revolution means discarding everything that was used against you,” she continued. “Sometimes it means reclaiming what was stolen from you.”
Sergei studied her a long moment. “You are not forced?” he asked, simply.
Shirin’s mouth curved, into something that could only be described as determined and threatening. “If anyone here tried to force me,” she said quietly, “you would see a second revolution.”
A ripple of restrained laughter moved through the group; even Sergei’s moustache twitched.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack

“The revelation came in flashes: the planet visible only in moments, during the surges of light blasted between the orbital mirrors and the satellites scattered perilously close to it. Each time it flickered into view, exposed by the relentless pulses, it almost disappeared again into the cold dark of space and time, fully reemerging altered. Size fluctuating by percentages that defied physics: swelling, contracting. Colour shifting from muted greyish green to bruised emerald, lines of deeper shadow pulsing across its surface.

It looked alive. Pulsating. Breathing. As if it existed in different planes, not fully anchored to this reality, a visitor from some orthogonal dimension bleeding through.

Two moons orbited it, locked in unnatural proximity, different sizes but bound like Siamese twins in gravitational chains. Both coppery and burnt, their surfaces scorched to a uniform metallic sheen, craters etched with patterns too regular to be natural.

Constructions dotted them: angular spires and lattices, satellites vibrating with faint energy signatures even at this distance. Ramps; vast, curving structures; encircled the planet itself, rings of alloy and field emitters fixing the moons in place, stabilising what should not be stable.

But the horror only grew from here. Where the planet stood, the fabric of space flared and whined in a horrible growl, audible now through the facility’s audio relays; a static-laced rumble that set teeth on edge. A violent, ruthless pull emanated from it: gravitational anomalies spiking, temporal eddies registering as localised slowdowns in light propagation.

Instruments screamed with conflicting data; mass readings inverting, entropy values negative, quantum fluctuations off the charts. Horrible stats poured in; radiation profiles that matched no known isotope, magnetic fields twisting in impossible knots, biological signatures flickering like ghosts in the noise.

The entire planet was one huge anomaly; an infection spreading through space and time, corrupting the very rules that bound the solar system. It did not belong. It hungered.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack

“She watched Shirin work and felt something close to respect. The Iranian woman carried herself like someone who had already buried her illusions.
Moti finally broke the silence among the observers. “They’re not hiding the lion,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “That’s new.”
Eliyahu answered without turning. “New crowns rise when old ones fall. Always.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack

“You’re my storm,” he had whispered once, face buried in her neck after a long night, his gentle hands tracing her scars like maps to buried treasure. And she had loved him for it, fiercely, in ways she had never allowed herself before. Very much. Enough to dream, in rare, unguarded moments, of a life beyond the Front’s grey construct, a small dacha somewhere, with proper mornings and no radios crackling orders.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack

“Everything that sounds that good is too good to be true,” Moti answered. “And even if it weren’t, nothing here lasts. Not cities. Not empires. Not moons.”
He inhaled slowly, painfully.
“I already brought you back,” he continued. “Almost every night. In ink. In memory. In the way I still argue with you when I can’t sleep. That’s enough. It hurts. But it’s real.”
Shuki stepped closer still. “You’d choose pain?”
“Yes.”
The word came without hesitation.
“If I lose the pain,” Moti said, “I lose what it meant to love you. To love them. I’d be something else. Some hollow thing getting used to losing the same people twice.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack

“Thomas Aquinas, ever the systematician, had woven Aristotelian categories into the fabric of revelation, insisting that grace perfected nature without destroying its intelligibility. Yet Tenen’s geometric reading of the Hebrew letters seemed to reach further back, toward a primordial semiotics where form and meaning were inseparable, a notion that resonated with the medieval Christian fascination with the Book of Nature as a second scripture.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack

“In my world,” he began, “there is a teaching that nothing is revealed to a person unless it belongs to him in some way. Not possession; belonging in the sense of relevance. If a question arrives at your doorstep, it is because you have the capacity to wrestle with it. If you truly had no tools for it, you would not even recognize it as a question.”
Giuseppe frowned slightly. “That sounds comforting. A little too comforting.”
“It is not meant to be comforting,” Eliyahu replied gently. “It is meant to be accurate.”
He brushed snow from the cuff of his sleeve and continued, as if they were discussing a page of Talmud rather than the architecture of the cosmos.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack

“The Holy Trinity makes sense on a scientific level if you include higher dimensions and our perceptual limits. We’re three-dimensional creatures embedded in a higher-dimensional reality we can’t fully perceive. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could be a single entity viewed along different axes or temporal slices. Like how a hypercube projects as separate, contradictory shapes to a 3D observer: distinct appearances, same underlying object. It’s not mysticism. It’s just incomplete observation of incredible amount of energy. Which is basically building material of everything.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack

“Bishop, I hear the frustration, and I won’t pretend every voice coming out of Jerusalem is measured. Some speak too loudly, too possessively. But Judaism isn’t an excuse; it’s a memory of exile and return that has lasted longer than most empires. For many of us, the land isn’t conquest; it’s the only place where we were ever allowed to stop running. I don’t defend every policy, every settlement, every excess. I only ask for the same nuance you would want for your own Church’s long history of power and error.”
― Džana Todosijević, The Crack