Quote of the day
“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.
“He was very fluent and very comic, for he had reached the state when all the world was his friend.”
from Romanian Furrow – ‘Touches the very soul of rural Romania’ by Donald Hall
I’m both frightened and aroused
from Wonder Woman
“You can’t get so hung up on where you’d rather be that you forget to make the most of where you are.”
from the movie “Passengers”
