Quote of the day
“That’s what I guess we all are; explorers in time, searching for that perfect moment when we know we belong when and where we are. And when we find it, we try and hold on and enjoy it as long as we can, because it may not last forever.”
from I Just Had to Go Back to Di Island by Anthony Bjorklund
– Anthony Bourdain
“My father started to cry and I realized that he never had cried when we listened to that carol before, when my grandfather was still with us. ‘Why are you crying?’ I once asked him and he said he cried because he was the oldest in our family, that he remembered how it was when he was in the pack, singing those beautiful carols, and he cried because he was the next man in our family to die.”
from The Pigs Slaughter by Florin Grancea
“Kids will learn anything they want to learn, anything they have a use for. But to make them learn things they don’t have any use for, you have to send them to school. We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.”
“Which in fact they do not learn.”
“Which in fact, when it’s all over and the last bell rings, they have not learned.”
Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael
“We’re constantly changed by events going on in our lives. Sometimes they’re cumulative and chip away at our psyche, like yet another bad day at the office, or another smile from a pretty girl that raises our confidence. But occasionally something happens that alters us in the blink of an eye, and we instantly become a different person, for better or for worse.”
from I Just Had to go Back to Di Island by Anthony Bjorklund
From I’m an Old Commie by Dan Lungu
“Coming home, I took a close look at the block of flats where we live…The block was no longer new like it was when we moved in, deliriously happy. More than 30 years have passed since then and it hadn’t seen so much as a lick of paint in all that time. The walls were peeling, and the corners have been eaten away by the rain. On the wall above a window on the first floor, there was a thick black streak left by smoke. In the winter they’d probably put a wood stove in and stuck the flue out the window. The steps in front of the entrance were chipped and the banisters were bent, rattling to the touch.”
This description took me immediately back to the giant communist era edifices that line Bulevardul Unirii in Bucharest.
Something my sister said reminded me of this. Probably the best, and perhaps the only, advice that my father ever gave me about life:
Illegitimi non carborundum
Roughly, “Don’t let the bastards get you down”
Word.
