Category: ordinariness
Quotes of Category: ordinariness
Jane remembers those years, though, as if they had been {a movie}--in part because her friends...always talked about everything as if it was over {"Remember last night?"}, while holding out the possibility that whatever happened could be rerun. Neil didn't have that sense of things. He thought people shouldn't romanticize ordinary life. "Our struggles, our little struggles," he would whisper, in bed, at night. Sometimes he or she would click on some of the flashlights and consider the ceiling, with the radiant swirls around the bright nuclei, the shadows like opened oysters glistening in brine. {In the '80s, the champagne was always waiting.} book-quoteordinarinessordinary-lifeOdd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing {a recognizably bad person does} can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the {Nazi} Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. book-quotewarcivilizationevil
