1
" That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, " The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food. Adults are the death of hope. "
8
" What remains to us here, behind the Yser, is not much more than a strip of land almost impossible to defend; a few rain-soaked trenches around razed villages; roads blown to smithereens, unusable by any vehicle; a creaky old horse cart we haul around ourselves, loaded with crates of damp ammunition that are constantly on the verge of sliding into a canal, forcing us to slog like madmen for every ten yards of progress as we stifle our warning cries; the snarling officers in the larger dug-outs, walled off with boards, where the privates have to bail water every day and brush the perpetual muck off their superiors’ boots; the endless crouching as we walk the trenches, grimy and smelly; our louse-ridden uniforms; our arseholes burning with irritation because we have no clean water for washing them after our regular attacks of diarrhoea; our stomach cramps as we crawl over heavy clods of earth like trolls in some gruesome fairy tale; the evening sun slanting down over the barren expanse; infected fingers torn by barbed wire; the startling memory of another, improbable life, when a thrush bursts into song in a mulberry bush or a spring breeze carries the smell of grassy fields from far behind the front line, and we throw ourselves flat on our bellies again as howitzers open fire out of nowhere, the crusts of bread in our hands falling into the sludge at the boot-mashed bottom of the stinking trench. "
― Stefan Hertmans , War and Turpentine
14
" But that did no harm, and a sad young mind found a way to match things up with an antagonist. Now, just stand a child up against your body. How tall is it? Possibly only up to your hip. Still, a man,—or an animal thinking that it is a man—will slap, whip, or viciously yank an arm of so frail, so soft a tiny body! That is what I call a coward!! By golly! almost a criminal! If a tot is what you call naughty, (and no child voluntarily is,) why not lift that young body up onto your lap, and talk—don’t shout—about what it just did? Shouting gains nothing with a tot. Man can shout at Man, at dogs, and at farm animals; but a man who shouts at a child is, at that instant, sinking in his own muck of bullyism; and bullyism is a sin, if anything in this world is. Ah Youth! You glorious dawn of Mankind! You bright, happy, glowing morning Sun; not at full brilliancy of noon, I know, but unavoidably on your way! Youth! How I do thrill at taking your warm, soft hand; walking with you; talking with you; but, most important of all, laughing with you! That is Man’s pathway to glory. A man who drops blossoms in passing, will carry joy to folks along his way; a man who drops crumbs will also do a kindly act; but a man who drops kind words to a sobbing child will find his joy continuing for many a day; for blossoms will dry up; crumbs may blow away; but a kind word to a child may start a blossom growing in that young mind, which will so far surpass what an unkindly man might drop, as an orchid will surpass a wisp of grass. Just stop a bit and look back at your footprints along your past pathway. Did you put many humps in that soil which a small child might trip on? Did you angrily slam a door, which might so jolt a high-strung tot as to bring on nights and nights of insomnia? Did you so constantly snarl at it that it don’t want you around? In fact, did you put anything in that back-path of yours which could bring sorrow to a child? Or start its distrust of you, as its rightful guardian? If so, go back right now, man, and fix up such spots by kindly acts from now on. Or, jump into a pond, and don’t crawl out again!! For nobody wants you around! "
― Ernest Vincent Wright , Gadsby
16
" In the deep, wet tangled, wild jungle where even natives won't go is a mystical, dangerous river. The river's got no name because naming it would make it real, and no one wanted to believe that river be real. They say you get there only inside a dream-but don't you think of it at bedtime, now, 'cause not everyone who goes there be able to leave! That jungle canopy, it so leafy true daylight can never break in the riverbank, it be wet muck thick with creatures that eat you alive if you stay still too long. To miss that fate, you gots to go into the black water. But the water be heavy as hot tar; once you in, it bind you and pull you along, bit by bit, 'til you come to the end of the land, and then over the water goes in a dark, slow cascade, the highest falls in the history of the world ever. There be demons in that cascading water, and snakes, and wraiths that whisper in your ears. They love you, they say. You should give yourself to them, stay with them, become one of them, they say. 'Isn't it good here?' they say. 'No pain, no trouble.' But also no light and no love and no joy and no ground. You tumble and tumble as you fall, and you try and choose, but your mind be topsy-turvy and maybe you can't think so well, and maybe you can't choose right, and maybe you never wake up. " It felt like that," I tell Tootsie, " even after you got me out and Scott moved me to Highland. I couldn't choose. I couldn't shut out the wraiths...But you would say, 'Hang on, sweetie,' and Scottie would say, 'I miss you, Mama,' and Scott would hold me, just hold me and say nothing at all." Tootsie snorts. " Scott was useless the whole while." " Scott was in the river, too. "
20
" This might not mean much to you right now, but fer what it's worth, I'll tell you. Maybe I know better'n most. Life ain't black an white. People ain't neether. Family, friends, lovers. It's all a lot more complicated. The longer I live, the more I see, the less I know fer sure. Especially when it comes to matters of the heart. So dry yer tears. Whoever he is, he won't be cryin over you. Men never do. That's the one thing I do know fer sure. Now, muck up them boots a bit. "
― Moira Young , Rebel Heart (Dust Lands, #2)
