Reading 1001 discussion

8. Share your favorite quotes and/or scenes from Waiting for the Barbarians.

“Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”

pg 23 "from the knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering."

Pg 24, "the joy has gone from my life"

pgs 153 to 154; discussion of empire

Pg 156 "I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy." "he (the Colonel) the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow."

pg 178, "I wanted to live outside history...."

Pg 9 "Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. These dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Show me a barbarian army and I will believe."

Pg 23 " I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand , there was no way , once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end."

pg 63 " It seems appropriate that a man who does not know what ot do with the woman in his bed should not know what to write."

Pg 169 "I wanted to live outside the history that the Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history the Empire has laid upon them."

My pages are different - I read a Penguin Books Paperback edition.

p.24 "I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it was worth the trouble.

pp. 107-108 - the scene in which he interrupts the abuse of the nomad prisoners, is beaten for his trouble and reflects that their beating him conveyed his message more clearly than anything he could have said.

p.133 "What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history."

The quote Kristel noted about being the "lie that Empire tells itself."

p.143 "In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished."

I read it in Norwegian, so I will spare you from my favourite quotes ;)

Hilde wrote: "I read it in Norwegian, so I will spare you from my favourite quotes ;)"

:-)

p. 53 - 'We speak of the barbarians. He is convinced, he says, that for part of the way he was trailed at a distance by barbarians. Are you sure they were barbarians? I ask. Who else could they have been? he replies. His colleagues concur.'