#wwi

I..." He struggled to answer. "When everything was quiet, I went up to the corridor and the curtain in the livingroom was open just a crack... I could see outside. I watched, only for a few seconds." He had not seen the outside world for twenty-two months. There was no anger or reproach. It was Papa who spoke. How did it look?" Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment. "There were stars," he said. "They burned by eyes. ↗

— Markus Zusak

#jew #stars #wwii #anger

It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness. ↗

— Jessie Douglas Kerruish

#war #wwi #dreams

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable. ↗

— Robert Hughes

#industrialization #language #wwi #age

I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#aryans #demon #hitler #perspective #propaganda

In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#war #wwii #age

Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya. ↗

— Judith Clancy

#food #history #japan #kyoto #machiya

Mute in that golden silence hung with green, Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes Remembrance of all beauty that has been, And stillness from the pools of Paradise. ↗

— Siegfried Sassoon

#poetry #sassoon #world-war-one #wwi #beauty

I keep such music in my brain No din this side of death can quell; Glory exulting over pain, And beauty, garlanded in hell. ↗

— Siegfried Sassoon

#beauty

At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.) ↗

— Anna Reid

#polar-exploration #siege #starvation #wwii #change

I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me. ↗

— Diet Eman

#holocaust #jesus-christ #prison #resistance #righteous