Foden Quotes

At the edge of the field Silva and Stefan witnessed heartrending images in greyscale as thousands of desperate refugees streamed down the road in leaden shades of melancholy.  This somber line of tired and dirty humans moved so close together that they jostled each other with each step; their random movements reminded Silva of corks bobbing in a slow moving stream.  They watched them pass from the side of the road, but eventually fell-in, trudging along with the suffering others, feeling safer in numbers, hoping for a destination worth finding.

There was a story out there, in a scary place, and she had to bear witness.

Stefan with his camera at the ready photographed a church and mosque and synagogue reduced to a cross and a crescent and a star, solitary monuments to what people once believed.  They silently passed the broken Olympic Stadium, now a graveyard without glory for the decomposing dead.

She polished her words like smooth river rocks lying perfectly organized in brilliant rainbow shades under crystal clear, slow moving water.

Stefan, please, get to work.  Take a picture of this. You want a photo? Of this? War in all its ugliness.  A Pulitzer Prize awaits. You want me to document a war crime? Your war crime? Yes.  I do. You understand they can’t be untaken. Proceed.

Thierry was one.  An award winning documentary film producer based in Paris.  Her curiosity was not driven so much by his fame or talent, with which he was generously endowed on both counts, but by his elusiveness.  He had a reputation for chasing the most complicated and dangerous assignments that others considered too risky.  He had money for all occasions.  He had a reputation among men as a man with a reputation among women.

The problem with bearing fanatical witness to this kind of human depravity is that ambiguity and contradiction easily overwhelm the nuance required for understanding.  There seems to me that no logic applies to our time of terror, as if it were a dream.  There was no lapse of incoherence; none of it was incomprehensible; our shared pain was not sensible then and unexplainable afterwards.  It was actually all too real all the time, and we were simply trying to navigate an uncertain passage through it in search of safety.

And now insane men adrift in a world without order formed a line at the door.  They rendered unto her every evil act brought into this world by God.  They fell upon her with brutality that none of them at any other time would have thought possible.  There was once no scenario that would lead them to behave this way.  At any other time in their life there were no words or arguments that could convince them to treat a woman with such wanton disregard.  No one now asked, “What brought me to this?” Not one of them asked, “Who are these men?  How did we end up here, doing these things? Who am I now?

I understand your position, Dave.  It’s a big story, and you worked hard to get it.  But if you don’t drop me at the Europa, I’ll blow your head off.  Imagine how big that story would be. There’s no need for these histrionics.  We’ll go to the Holiday Inn.  You can rest, shower, debrief.  You’ll be among friends. Last chance, Dave.  You can be the hero or the headline.  Your call. Let’s talk it out. No.  You talk too much. He started a new line of argument, but before the words passed his lips his brains passed them on the way out. A dirty reddish slime painted the windshield; it covered the dashboard and console. It poured and dripped from the ceiling to the seat.  The driver was covered on one side of his head and body.  The mess made the crowded taxi undrivable. -Also, someone crapped their pants.

Nothing remains.  The destruction is complete: love, lives, families, friends, cities, homes – all gone now.  All our efforts to be good, to do the right thing, to act well, to be just and generous are now for naught.  Because juxtaposed against any hope for fairness is wickedness, pure and simple.  In some abstract formulation these things may exist in equal measure, which is to say that the scales balance when taking all things into consideration. But that is fantasy, the stuff of religion, hope beyond all reason. Because for those caught in the whirlwind, in the chaos of manifest evil, despair is all there is. Civilization falls away: everything is pointless now.  Survival requires reciprocity. What then if there is none?

I want you to write like Alice Munro.  Stir the world.  Make people see the horror; show them their suffering relatives; show them that they’re not safe.  Let them know that they can’t even begin to imagine what’s happening here.  By making my reality more compelling than reality television is the only way you’ll get their attention. Psychotic and cynical. Who can tell the difference anymore between a severed head and a special effect?  Can you?  I doubt it, and I know you’ve been in the middle of it all and seen the damage first-hand.

But the floor retained an unparalleled measure of excellence with a decorative array of ceramic tiles precisely laid by an anonymous Muslim artisan with limitless patience, pride, or skill.  He left behind an ornate work of art in a short, squat, non-descript building near the most dangerous piece of real estate on the planet.  Silva often wondered how an architect so careless came to work with a craftsman so precise.  Looking at that floor, she often thought that if everyone applied just a fraction of his dedication to their own work, it might cancel out the hatred driving the destruction.

What was once a home she had taken apart one piece at a time, one day...She sold her belongings for money to buy food.  First the luxuries: a small statue, a picture.  Then the items with more utility: a lamp, a kettle.  Clothes left the closet at a rate of a garment a day…she burned everything in the basement first; then everything in the attic.  It lasted weeks, not months.  Though tempted, she left the roof alone.  She stripped the second floor, and the stairs.  She extracted every possible calorie from the kitchen.  she wasn’t working alone, because neighbourhood pirates simultaneously stole anything of value outside: door and window frames, fencing, stucco.  They pillaged her yard.  Breaking in was a boundary her neigbours had not yet crossed.  But the animals had.  Rats and mice and other vermin found the cracks without much effort.  Like her, they sought warmth and scraps of food.  With great reluctance, she roasted the ones she could catch.  She spent her nights fighting off the ones that escaped.

Then Drago began the deliberate, precise, business-like process of killing.  A knee-buckling burst of fire and flash laid waste to men and material within seconds.  A Panhard vehicle to Silva’s left simply disappeared in an explosion that spraying metal parts willy-nilly in every direction in a spread so thorough that Drago thought they were under fire, and he yelled at his men to respond.  Another blast destroyed a six-wheeled reconnaissance vehicle, but it didn’t break it apart; it simply expanded as if swollen or bloated, like an air mattress or inflatable toy, though it still had weight and quickly collapsed over its own suspension.  Some trucks were overturned; a Jeep flipped end-over-end.  None were left unscathed.  In short order, what had been ten or twelve vehicles were reduced to a single steaming and smoking pile of metal.

... la kuvunda halian ubani. There is no incense for something rotting. And that is the condition of the world. This I know.

They thought it was an enemy but it was only their own reflection.

there is a tendency in Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans. Had Amin been white, free Africa would have passed many resolutions condemning him. Being black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans.

the cause—that is the place where we cannot go.

There again, the acceleration of history is the job of ruthless men.

If you laugh at it, you’re stepping over the corpses. And if you work with him, well, it’s worse.

keeper and into

But friction is mostly a negative force, socially speaking. It reduces efficiency.” “Yes, but that negativity prevents bad plans as much as good ones. That

The young can be so unreasonable in what they expect from

It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values—the permanence of memory. —JOSEPH CONRAD,

a gigantic phantom rose suddenly out of the sea. I started backwards from a tall figure projected against a wall of ice. The wall was an iceberg—and the phantom, I slowly realised, was my own reflection, enormously enlarged.

Ryman himself said—all mistakes proceed from initial conditions.

information is perishable, lasting no longer than the structure to which it refers, just as the bathwater I was sitting in as I recalled all this would no longer be my bathwater once it ran down the plughole.

you just can’t use averages to predict the specifics of the next generation of eddies, any more than you could use an average to predict the life-story of an individual human being.

The process of measurement must have a beginning and end. The establishment of those points has an effect on the outcome.

Scotland might as well be a foreign country to one such as myself. But then I often felt like that in England, too, as did many of us who had grown up in the colonies. It was as if we had returned to a home different from the one we had been holding in our heads all that time.

They’re more fun outside your head than in, Campbell.

It is terrible the way you think time is going to change you. The way you think of some future time when things will be all right. And all that happens is that you drop back into the previous stream of time and it closes over your head.

It is the bad spirit that has come over this place. My grandmother says that it will only go away when you see a dog and a goat riding a bicycle together.

there is a tendency in Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans. Had Amin been white, free Africa would have passed many resolutions condemning him. Being black is now

Only then do I feel cleansed and full of vitality: the voice of the sea, the amniotic rock of it, the burst of salt air in the lungs, they can do this to you. As if the old soul, the bad soul, had been changed into little water drops and fallen into the ocean, never to be found.

I have a sensation of losing track of time. In front of me, the mountain floats up with the swell. Drifts away amid tendrils of mist. And then comes back into sight.

I was also feeding off a more general depression that sometimes settled over Kampala evenings. You had a sense of people not having gotten what they wanted during the day. The street vendors, for instance,

i Chakoten, eller om det vældige Artilleri. Den lille Dreng holdt meget af at løbe over Gaden og sætte sig paa Afviserstenen ved Foden af Voldbakken, ved hvilken Lejlighed der ogsaa stundom kunde falde et Besøg af hos Soldaterne i Vagtstuen. Eller jeg kunde løbe over til det andet

I ethvert menneskes liv er der områder, som endnu ingen har fulgt dem ind i. Det er ikke-kærlighedens isolerede zoner. Her standser foden. Den stivner i en evig uforløst gebærde,

That’s exaggerating,” she said. “It’s quite a hard life here. I often wish we could go back.” “Why couldn’t you?” I said. “There’d be no point. We’re African now.” “No, we’re not,” her husband said. “And we will go back. When the time is right.” “There’s nothing for us there, Spiny. You know how depressed you got on our last leave.” “Hmm.” He looked cross, and then she turned to me, her lapis earrings gleaming. “England has changed so much since we left. You’ll find, if you stay here a few years,

I’ve come to this conclusion, on the rustling of the dried leaf skirts. It’s like a form of vagueness that lets you imagine things, only you hear it.