Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Amra Pajalic

Quote by Amra Pajalic

“Now the combined sounds blend in. The sound of piss trickling into the bucket, or shit dropping down to splatter onto the smelly leftovers from previous visitors. The sound of grenades and bullets wreaking destruction outside. Sometimes it sounds like a rocket-propelled grenade is right over us, that we should expect the roof to cave in on us and crush us to death. But that is another thing we have gotten used to. We don’t flinch anymore when a grenade whistles overhead.” Siege”

Quote by Amra Pajalic

Book:The Cuckoo's Song
Create image

Work

The Cuckoo's Song

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Amra Pajalic

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Amra Pajalic. more

You May Also Like

“Mama clutched the wall, her face white with terror. 'Stupid girl!' She shook me by my shoulders. 'You can’t run out like that! Snipers will get you.' Like a long thin finger, my hometown of Srebrenica stretched in the valley between steep hills, clustered along the main road leading in and out of town. The green canopy of the birch tree forest looked like green fairy floss dotted with the burgundy terracotta tile roofs of white rendered houses. The nearby hills were a perfect vantage point for snipers. In the time it took them to shoot once, miss, and correct their target, an innocent bystander would have time to take just one step.” Fragments”

WarSiegeBosnian WarSrebrenica
Book:The Cuckoo's Song
Create image

“The body clings to life at any cost. It even eats itself. When there’s no food, it turns cannibal and devours its fat, then its muscle then its bones. I’ve seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked palace. No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smoldering village. To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside forever. There’s no pawnshop for the heart. You can’t take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times. You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive. And if you refuse? If you felt for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted, and the birds are silent. When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly.”

WarTraumaThe Passion
Author:janette winterson
Create image

“When next this [Gaza war] happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.”

WarHistoryOccupationJustificationPalestineGazaColonizationGaza War
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Create image

“Roger had thought of mankind as mature, but there had come to him of late the same feeling he had had before in the bosom of his family. Mankind had suddenly unmasked and shown itself for what it was—still only a precocious child, with a terrible precocity. For its growth had been one sided. Its strength was growing at a speed breathless and astounding. But its vision and its poise, its sense of human justice, of kindliness and tolerance and of generous brotherly love, these had been neglected and were being left behind. Vaguely he thought of its ships of steel, its railroads and its flaming mills, its miracles, its prodigies. And the picture rose in his mind of a child, standing there of giant's size with dangerous playthings in its hands, and boastfully declaring, "I can thunder over the earth, dive in the ocean, soar on the clouds! I can shiver to atoms a mountain, I can drench whole lands with blood! I can look up and laugh at God!”

War
Author:Ernest Poole
Create image

“Had he actually walked streets of quiet cars, Sunday morning peace of the Tiergarten, so far away? Another life. Ice cream, a taste that could never have existed. Now they boiled nettles and were glad to get them. God, he cried out. Won't they stop? The huge British tanks came on. Another building, it might have been an apartment house or a store, a school or office; he could not tell — the ruins toppled, slid into fragments. Below in the rubble another handful of survivors buried, without even the sound of death. Death had spread out everywhere equally, over the living, the hurt, the corpses layer after layer that already had begun to smell. The stinking, quivering corpse of Berlin, the eyeless turrets still upraised, disappearing without protest like this one, this nameless edifice that man had once put up with pride.”

War
Book:The Man in the High Castle
Create image