collage rock

“He was someone who was always embarrassed to discover his own innocence. I think that a feeling of superiority came naturally to him. With all their chatter about equality, Edith and Utch missed one point about Severin: he thought of himself as protecting Edith from his own complicated feelings. What a shock for him to learn that she was complicated too.”

“Instead he learned that life is not a choice between murdering your way to the throne or slopping back in a sty; that there are swinish kings and regal hogs; that the king may envy the pig; and that the possibilities of the not-life always change tormentingly to fit the particular embarrassments of the lived life.”

“What I liked seeing was something so mysterious broken down into steps, pieced together in charts and tables.”

“These were the details he missed, and they contributed to the growing list of things he didn’t know. This was the kind of Everyman he was - a little lost, a little misinformed (or uninformed), almost everywhere he was. Yet, even overfed, the doctor was undeniably attractive. Not every Everyman is attractive.”

“When you’re a foreigner, there’s nothing like a local newspaper to orient you.”

“Soon it would be dark; perhaps then the doctor could relax, for it would be better not to see one’s own death approaching.”

“Full of doubt one minute, brimming with conviction the next, the missionary was a walking contradiction, he was dependably unreliable.”

“As if she had saved up her whole life to acquire this hoard of scraps.”

“We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.”