#ch

I was unwilling to - without getting too philosophical about it - I was unwilling to structure my spirituality in the way that the church wanted me to structure it. ↗

— Peter Jurasik

#church #getting #i #me #philosophical

My childhood is completely... when I look back, it was '50s in New York, upper-middle class, it was completely idyllic and golden and wonderful - sweet in every way. ↗

— Peter Jurasik

#childhood #class #completely #every #golden

A good book written for children can be read by adults. ↗

— Norton Juster

#children #good #good book #read #written

And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters. ↗

— Norton Juster

#because #between #book #characters #conversation

I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I'd think, Where did they get that? I didn't read that in there. Later you look at it and think, That's kind of an interesting idea. ↗

— Norton Juster

#did #explain #get #i #i remember

People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I've never heard of. ↗

— Norton Juster

#always #ask #bunch #cite #heard

The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way. ↗

— Norton Juster

#communicating #expectation #i #i think #important

A child is owed the greatest respect; if you have ever have something disgraceful in mind, don't ignore your son's tender years. ↗

— Juvenal

#disgraceful #ever #greatest #ignore #mind

If he could sleep on it. He would make his bed with white sheets And disappear into the white, Like a man diving, If he could be certain That the light Would not keep him awake, The light that reaches To the bottom. ↗

— Donald Justice

#bed #bottom #certain #could #disappear

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#camus #communism #czechoslovakia #david-szmulevski #east-germany