Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom Quotes

“so many white roses whose names won’t survive either, resistance groups and newspapers now as forgotten as soldiers waiting for the enemy veiled in snow, unknowingly digging their own graves in the forests, an entire infantry on alert among the pines and spruce, France, Belgium, elsewhere young German soldiers seeming to sleep, half-opened lips on the snow which likewise moulds itself to their boots and helmets, every one of them forever forgotten, dying for what or whom in these ice fields, oblivion or Hitler, even those still breathing on stretchers, statues of ice, petrified flesh outfitted in frost, this is the story of winter glory, cold and misery, men and horses finished off in the frigid fog, the young in uniform, hands raised and crying, I give up, enough, enough”
― Marie-Claire Blais, Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom

“Hong Kong, please watch over him, he saw that young man Lazaro in a dream and is convinced he’s a terrorist, always has been, and I should never have let him into the house that day with the tray of seafood I’d ordered; this anxiety gives him abominable, uncontrollable thoughts, but the analyst told me to look at it differently, he said I know the road he’s on, and even if it leads down into the abyss, yawning glaciers, he sees things we don’t, fresh tracks under a starlit night, for him brightly lit, so much so that even in the farthest depths he knows he can’t get lost, and you’ll see he’ll find his way back to us”
― Marie-Claire Blais, Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom

“him the ordinary man whose Buddhist spirituality often flickered, really just questing for inner silence with not too much of an outer mess, although the sordid invasions of the everyday already defeated him like a spiderweb wound around his brain with at least one demon of political carnage cancelling out all his most joyous moments, even when he had his daughter Lou in his arms and kissed her, all these nasty little hominids squeezed his mental space chuckling and ridiculing, as if to say we’re the worst ones, the liars, the sneaks, and and we always come out on top, so your happiness is always going to be shaky at best, and the best he could do was push them away with the gradual torpor of silence and yoga practice”
― Marie-Claire Blais, Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom