Author: Tetman Callis
“The crew of a stricken aircraft had a one-in-five chance of escaping alive. Fighting the G-forces of a diving or spiraling, uncontrollable descent, they had to ditch the hatches, reach their parachutes and somehow struggle clear before the bomber struck the ground. They tried desperately to avoid baling out in the immediate target area, for they had heard too many stories of bomber crews killed by enraged civilians or soldiers, a fate not unknown to Luftwaffe airmen in the London blitz.” – Max Hastings, Bomber Command
“The wartime bombing of cities remains a bitterly controversial issue in the twenty-first century. More than a few writers, not all of them German or Japanese, claim that it represents an Allied war crime. . . . I believe that we should never for a moment waver in our conviction that the Allied cause in World War II, even granted the embarrassment of the association of the United States and Britain with Stalin’s tyranny, remains immeasurably morally superior to that of the Axis. I am highly critical of many aspects of the bomber offensive, especially in its last 1945 phase, when it contributed more to punishing the Germans than to defeating them. But it was undertaken with the military purpose of achieving or hastening the defeat of Germany, and later Japan. Those powers were responsible for initiating the bombing of civilians and had no possible legitimate grounds for complaint when their own peoples suffered the same fate.” – Max Hastings, Bomber Command
“Rely on the blunder factor. Sit back and wait for the Fascists to louse it up.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
“If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
“When we come kicking into the world, we are God, the universe is the limit of our senses. And when we get older, when we discover that the universe is not us, it’s the deepest trauma of our existence.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (emphasis in original)
“There damn sure ain’t anything special about a man if he can smell as bad as he does when he’s dead.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
“The root of all the liberals’ ineffectiveness comes right spang out of the desperate suspension in which they have to hold their minds.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
“It was always the men who never got anywhere that did the bitching.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
“The flowering of equality, self-reliance, and civic virtue in the non-slave states from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century is one of the political wonders of the world, a signal achievement in humankind’s moral history. It was made possible by a great crime: it all took place on stolen, ethnically-cleansed land. Likewise that other pinnacle of political enlightenment, Athenian democracy, which rested on slavery. But in both cases, didn’t the subordination or expropriation of the many allow the few to craft social relations from which the rest of the world has learned invaluable lessons? Is some such stolen abundance or leisure a prerequisite of moral and cultural advance? Even if we acknowledge the dimensions of the crime, can we really regret the achievement?” – George Scialabba, “Floats Like a Vulture”
“At Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, a village just beyond Pouppeville, French baker Pierre Caldron had been awakened before sunrise by the sound of gunfire. A German officer had been billeted at Caldron’s home, but had left two days earlier. Looking out his second-floor window, Caldron caught sight of an American paratrooper moving through the yard. The soldier pointed a rifle at Caldron, but fortunately for the Frenchman, he was wearing his white baker’s hat. ‘I think he must have thought I was a medic from my hat,’ Caldron reasoned. The American moved on without firing. At 7 AM, a railway guard from the village rushed into Caldron’s house, kissed him on the cheek, and cried, ‘They’re here! They’re here! They’ve landed, and if you don’t believe me, here’s an American cigarette.’ ” – Roy Morris, Jr., “ ‘We’ll Start the War from Here’ ”
“There is nothing inherently objectionable about using common sense when deciphering a statute. To the contrary, our court has specifically cited with approval the proposition that courts do not set aside common experience and common sense when construing statutes.” – Justice Karmeier, Nelson v. Artley
“The preponderance of the entertainment and desire market is a stage in the social-pacification enterprise, in which it has been given the function of obscuring, provisionally, the living contradictions that cross every point on the fabric of imperial biopolitics.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (trans. Reines)
“We become ourselves by wanting other people: not only wanting to have them, but wanting sometimes more urgently to become them, to feel as we imagine they feel, to think or create or whatever else we wish to do as naturally as we imagine they do. We take assignments in being by adopting as our ideals the things other people never were, or failed to become, and then never stop doubting whether what we are is theirs or ours.” – Jedediah Purdy, “Maybe Connect”
“Always turn and face the attack.” – Group Captain Adolph Gysbert “Sailor” Malan, DSO, DFC, from “Ten of My Rules for Air Fighting”
“The toughest job in the military is that of infantry platoon leader. The fresh second lieutenant who finds himself in command of 40 other infantrymen is often a newcomer to combat, younger than many of his soldiers and poorly prepared for the rigors of battlefield leadership. In spite of these obstacles, the new lieutenant must come to terms with the fact that the futures and fortunes of his men are in his hands. He must apply his theoretical training to the battlefield and learn fast. Truly, a young person can work under no greater pressure.” – John McManus, review of William L. Devitt’s Shavetail: The Odyssey of an Infantry Lieutenant in World War II
“I doubt that work ennobles man and I absolutely rule out that it ennobles woman.” – Elena Ferrante, “The Author Is Purely a Name” (trans. Goldstein)
“I think of writing as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories you tell, the words you use and work on, the characters you try to give life to, are only tools with which you circle around the evasive thing, unnamed and shapeless, which belongs only to you, and which is a sort of key to all the doors, the true reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping the keys, filling pages. The question of every story is always: Is this the right story to seize what lies silent in the depths of me, that living thing which, if captured, spreads through all the pages and animates them? The answer is uncertain, even when one arrives at the end of a story. What happened in the lines, between the lines? Often, after struggles and joys, on the pages there is nothing—events, dialogues, dramatic turns, only this—and you’re frightened by your very desperation.” – Elena Ferrante, “The Author Is Purely a Name” (trans. Goldstein)
“Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.” – Elena Ferrante, “The Author Is Purely a Name” (trans. Goldstein)
“Words draw out words: one can always write a banal, elegant, heartfelt, amusing coherent page on any subject, low or high, simple or complex, frivolous or fundamental.” – Elena Ferrante, “The Author Is Purely a Name” (trans. Goldstein)
“On April 19 [1945], we occupied Oranienburg, a city of 25,000 people about 35 miles from Berlin. In the middle of town was a walled compound called Sachsenhausen. Originally built for political prisoners, it was the first concentration camp, older than Dachau. For the first time we came upon survivors—just barely surviving. The majority were women from all over Europe, Jewish and Christian. They were in deplorable condition, incoherent, afraid, crying uncontrollably because they did not know who we were, with our Polish uniforms. I tried all my languages to assure them that they were safe and in good hands now. Some Hungarian women spoke German with an accent, and I told them that we were Polish and that I was Jewish. We gave them food and water from our kitchen and told them that more would be coming. That was very gratifying. I felt that if I died the next day, it was worth it to know that at least I had saved somebody.” – Bernhard Storch (interviewed by Jon Guttman in “Polish Artilleryman on the Eastern Front”)
“You cannot possibly imagine what a devastating impact it had on a front-line soldier, entering those factory-like buildings and discovering that this facility [Majdanek] was a death camp. What I saw upon entering that camp was a large building, and I remember there was a sign pointing to a ‘Bad und Disinfektion’ facility. The inside of that barracks was made of concrete, with benches all around the room. In the next room were large square concrete structures without windows, only a small skylight in the ceiling. I think there were six rooms on each side, with heavy steel doors, each with a small opening for looking in. Between the two large buildings were dozens of light-green barracks, and there I saw clothes sorted out, with all kinds of luggage and other items belonging to adults and children. I had to pass dozens of that same type of barracks to reach a crematorium at the other end—as I recall, half a mile. On the way, I saw warehouses full of boots, shoes and little shoes by the thousands, all sorted out to perfection, German style. Further down the road was an enormous mountain of white ashes with small human bones. At that point, I decided to recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, and a Christian soldier knelt to pray beside me. For the first time since childhood, I lost my composure. All those hardened soldiers cried together. We had orders to rush back to our front-line positions, but there was one last enormous structure that I had to investigate. It turned out to be the crematorium, with six or seven enormous furnaces and factory-style chimneys. There was also a regular wooden house, where the director of the crematorium used to live.” – Bernhard Storch (interviewed by Jon Guttman in “Polish Artilleryman on the Eastern Front”)
“I write because I need to create a world I want, even if it can only exist in words.” – Daphne Gottlieb (interview by Jessa Crispin in Bookslut)
“Peace is not a principle, it is only a desirable state of affairs, and can’t be obtained without a capacity for violence at least equal to the violence of the threat.” – Clive James, “Joseph Conrad: Anticipating Terrorism”
“All across Hamburg, the firestorm sucked air to feed itself. The fire raged three miles up, and winds were moving at 150 miles per hour. As the heat hit clouds overhead, a greasy, black rain started falling. On the ground, the intense heat set many people afire. Many people saved themselves by diving into canals or taking refuge in open spaces like soccer fields. Others survived in public shelters that had gas- and smoke-tight doors. But there were few of those. In most shelters, the firestorm drew out the oxygen and replaced it with carbon monoxide. Others were felled by flying timbers or falling bricks or were even dragged off into burning buildings by the wind. In all, more than 40,000 people perished in the three-hour firestorm.” – David H. Lippman, “Allied Aerial Destruction of Hamburg”
“What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22
“The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22
“It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (emphasis in original)
“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22
“Google ‘famous failures,’ and you’ll find an entire day’s reading, from the well-worn (Steve Jobs, J. K. Rowling, and Albert Einstein) to the obscure (Alan Hinkes, S. A. Andrée, Akio Morita). We reprint and repeat these tales of failure because we know they end well. They may contain plot twists and surprise endings, but before we even begin reading, we can bet hard money on the outcome. Against all odds, the invention will work, the championship game will be won, and the astronauts will make it back to Earth. We don’t share these stories for their surprise endings, but to remind us that our own mistakes might just be worthwhile in the end.” – Jessica Lahey, The Gift of Failure
“Elementary and secondary school teachers are professional teachers. Professors are professional scholars who share what they know with students as part of their agreement with the university—the rest of their commitment is to their own research and service to the university and their profession.” – Professor Michael Chemers (quoted by Jessica Lahey in The Gift of Failure) (emphases in original)