#senseless

(On WWI:) A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. ... A messenger came to the farm with a story to tell. It was not a story that meant much as stories went in those days. It was about how the war progressed in German East Africa and about a tall young man who was killed in it. ... It was an ordinary story, but Kibii and I, who knew him well, thought there was no story like it, or one as sad, and we think so now. The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all. But they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind him and took the courage, and went where they sent him because they said this was his duty and he believed in duty. ... He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight. He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant. But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear. ↗

— Beryl Markham

#death #senselessness #war #wwi #courage

On July 18, we will mark the 12th anniversary of the senseless loss of 85 lives in the bombing of the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. ↗

— Tom Lantos

#argentina #bombing #center #cultural #jewish

If nations could only depend upon fair and impartial judgments in a world court of law, they would abandon the senseless, savage practice of war. ↗

— Belva Lockwood

#could #court #depend #fair #impartial

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations. ↗

— Thomas Lynch

#essentially #i #language #make #me

And I used to go the punk clubs such as a gay club in Poland Street that everyone would go to because it was the only place you could go to looking like that without getting beaten senseless. ↗

— Gary Numan

#because #club #clubs #could #everyone

Nobel was a genuine friend of peace. He even went so far as to believe that he had invented a tool of destruction, dynamite, which would make war so senseless that it would become impossible. He was wrong. ↗

— Alva Myrdal

#believe #destruction #dynamite #even #far

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#grief #senselessness #time #life

We make junk, we consume junk and we are junk. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#life #senselessness #life

They'd smash up the world if they thought it would make a pretty noise. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#destruction

It took me less than half a lifetime to realize that regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties. Sooner or later everything is touched by it, despite our naive and senseless hope that just this time we will be spared its cold hand on our heart. ↗

— Jonathan Carroll

#cold #despite #everything #few #guaranteed