Zizzer
Is it vulgar to be happy? I've often wondered about this. Now I think about it all the time. Even though I have often said that people who are capable of happiness are evil and stupid, from time to time, I think this too: No, to be happy is not rude, and it takes brains.
34. oldal - To Be Happy
[…] I have now been walking the same streets for fifty years, and when I pass the site of my old school, which is now a parking lot, I remember both my days at the school and my last stroll through its empyt classrooms. At first its ruination pierced me like a knife, but now it is something to which I am slowly becoming accostumed. A city's ruins also help it to forget. First we lose a memory, but we know we've lost it and we want it back. Then we forget we have forgotten it, and the city can no longer remember its own past. The ruins that cause us such pain and open the road to forgetfulness become, in the end, the lots on which others can found new dreams.
69. oldal - Fires and Ruins
Taking one of those pills is like swallowing a small dose of death. Once you start with those things, your days are turned into a numbing regimen of forgetfulness and confusion, and there isn't a moment when you don't feel your head is stuffed with cotton balls and wadded-up shreds of paper. She doesn't want to shut down her life in order to survive her life. […] No, she says to herself now: fear of dying without having lived.
106. oldal
As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.
John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men 92% ↑ 9%
I asked my well-worn question: 'What do you think the government should do, then? Should it try and make peace with the Americans?'
'You said „Americans”, ' she reproached me.
'I'm sorry. North Americans. Unitedstatesians. Reaganians. Them.'
'It's all right,' she forgave me quickly. 'When I first came to Europe from Nicaragua, it would shocked me to hear the US called „America”. I wanted to protest, But we are America, not just them. But now I say it too: America, Americans. Europe teaches you a different perspectives.
'Yes,' I agreed, 'it certainly does.'
136. oldal - Silvia: An epilogue
Salman Rushdie: The Jaguar Smile A Nicaraguan Journey
We got back to the Rama language. There were only twenty-three people alive who could still speak it: the other Ramas had already lost their tounge. A French linguist had spent months with the ageing twenty-three, to record the structure and phonetics of the language before it disappeared. 'She came up againt quite a problem,' Cathy told me. 'Most of the old Ramas had lost their teeth, so they couldn't pronounce some of the words properly. Yeah.' False teeth were much too expensive to be an option. Dental costs could therefore deliver the final blow to a tiny, dying language. Nicaragua is a land of small tragedies as well as large ones.
101. oldal - 12 - The other side
Salman Rushdie: The Jaguar Smile A Nicaraguan Journey
Happy birthday, Nicaragua. I drank a toast in the best rum in the world, Flor de Caña Extra Seco. Mixed with Coke, it was called a Nica-libre, and after a few glasses I was ready to take on the salsa champions and knock them dead. I went outside to dance.
42. oldal - 6. - Estelí
Salman Rushdie: The Jaguar Smile A Nicaraguan Journey
[…] Lake Manaua and Lake Nicaragua (really an inland sea, and the only place in the world where you can be eaten by freshwater sharks) […]
16. oldal - 2. - Road to Camoapa