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Quote by David Albahari

“Repeat a word or phrase long enough, and you'll end up thinking you came up with it yourself. And when you think you've created a word, you can allow yourself to feel that you created the world.”

Quote by David Albahari

Book:Checkpoint
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Checkpoint

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David Albahari

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“Ultimately, said the colonel, the checkpoint is a two-way street, somebody is always crossing from one side to the other, meaning, added the colonel, that there would always be work for those charged with its maintenance. But, the commander dared interject, does that mean our position in the conflict will change, or that we'll turn our backs on old alliances and form new ones? The colonel's face fell, and he said the commander couldn't have heard any such thing from him. He, meaning the colonel, had merely served as a bearer of tidings, a courier, a screw in an intricate mechanism, no more. If the colonel was nothing but a screw, thought the commander, then what could he--meaning the commander--say for himself? He wasn't a screw or even a tack, smaller yet, or as thin as a straight pin...”

War
Book:Checkpoint
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“And while he mused over the last few weeks, the thought kept bothering him that, without his knowledge, of course, the whole company had been part of a cruel experiment, and they were sacrificed so insights on the structure of warfare could be gathered, which, in other words, meant that no one was to blame for what happened to the soldiers and commander... an army bureaucrat had had the bright idea that the time was ripe for a study of the impact on soldiers of a sudden shift in the enemy's standing (in other words, when friend becomes foe, or vice versa). What happened presumed not a reality-based result--the outcome of earlier events in this same reality--but instead a faux reality, .a strategy game like Battleship...”

WarYugoslavia
Book:Checkpoint
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“Poor bastard, I thought, listening to him. He’s trying to hide from us. He’s dying, and he knows we want to kill him. What a fate: to gasp your life out all alone in the mud of a dirty little creek, helpless to hold off the slow death that is inside you and the quicker death that is walking up on you on the other side of the water. A death without love, a death without hope. God, who invented war? But if he gets back alive, I may be dead.”

WarDeathWorld War IiEnemiesWar Memoir
Book:Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich
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“In an old family album Ever again you return, Melancholy, O meekness of the solitary soul. A golden day glows and expires. Humbly the patient man surrenders to pain Ringing with melodious sound and soft madness. Look! There's the twilight. Night returns once more and a mortal thing laments And another suffers in sympathy. Shuddering under autumn stars Yearly the head is bowed deeper. -Georg Trakl (1887-1914)”

Poetry
Author:Georg Trakl In an old family album
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