Samih Ibrahim
Beautiful and weird in a very good way.
She lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to care for, to call her own.
Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive, and thinking is killing me. I think and think and think.
No, Oskar, that's her museum. Mine's in the other room.
Tomorrow is another day... But if tomorrow is another day, what's today? The same day as it always is.
Watch out for the leaders... First the leaders and the led, the the tyrants and the slaves, then the masacres. That's how it's always gone.
It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someome must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.
When the slugs begin to talk there's no time to lose.
Had a few good & novel idea but so repetitive. After saying something smart, you will encounter 5 examples and 10 pages of the same previously said smart thing reworded to the point of boredom. The call to complete reform of the justice system at the end is also nice, but yet again should've been summarized into much much fewer words.
Lives up to its predecessor in all aspects. Couldn't stop & was effectively compelled to go on and pick it up again and again till the end. Loved how it treats how legends are made from the accumulation of events and incidents and how that get woven into a fabric of grandeur & heroism.
A few quotes to remember this by:
- The cost of a loaf is a simple thing & so a loaf is often sought. But some things are past valuing; laughter, land and love are never bought.
-It was the sort of anger that comes to a slow boil inside the hearts of good men who want justice, and finding it out of their grasp, decide vengeance is the next best thing.
-No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.
I wish I could forget it so I can read it again for the first time. The book that got everything right.
PS: I will just leave these here:
- “Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.”
- “Famine and plague were everywhere, and in some places there was such despair that mothers could no longer muster enough hope to give their children names”
- “More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere”
- “The boy grows upward, but the girl grows up”
- “She disappeared back into the crowd, a wonderful collection of gently moving curves”
Joe Hill is never afraid to kill a character. I enter this book prepared for this but still the grimness of some parts left me with a bad after taste. A book about how humans behave under duress; how some will turn bad while others stay good while the majority will just be gray. Some scenes are over explained for my taste but the flow of the rest is great.
Another gem of the foundation. Structurally feels like two books in one but still manages to feel coherent. The way the characters express their thoughts and dialog is one of the best.
“Only a lie that wasn't ashamed of itself could possibly succeed.”
“Nothing had to be true, but everything has to sound true.”
