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1 " 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
2 " Too much alleged ‘fantasy’ is just empty sugar, life with the crusts cut off. "
3 " Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it’s as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away. "
― Nadine Gordimer , The Ultimate Safari
4 " She said that the mummy and the daddy took their daughter up onto the moor. They had a picnic. They’d brought all of her favourite food – cheese sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off and strawberry-pink cupcakes – and when the little girl had finished eating, she looked around for her mummy and the daddy. But they’d gone. They’d left Evelyn on the moor by herself. "
― Sanjida Kay , The Stolen Child
5 " As I grabbed my cocoa, chocolate ran down my hand." This makes me feel like a five-year-old," I said, licking it off." If I ordered a sandwich at this place, do you think they'd cut the crusts off? "
