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How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed
Slavenka Drakulić
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I realize that I only have words and that, from time to time, as I hold them in my arms I am less lonely.”
“Why communism failed: it failed because of distrust, because of a fear for the future. Because deep down no body believed in a system that was continuously unable to provide for its life citizen's basic needs for forty years or more.”
“Only when there is no privacy can there be total control”
“It's hard to recognize discrimination when you live with it”
“Humor is the only way to overcome depression”
“How is a woman to tell the story of her life and not stumble upon men?”
“Every public space is like a billboard, with messages from the collective subconscious of the nation. There one can read passivity, rage indifference, fear, double standards, subversion, bad economy, a twisted definition of 'public' itself, the whole Weltanschauung - an entire range of emotions and attitudes is exposed.”
“That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf – a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so carefully, like something unique. 'This is the book I told you about,' she says, holding out the Anthology of Feminist Texts, a collection of early American feminist essays, 'the only feminist book translated into the Polish language,' the only such book to turn to when you are sick and tired of reading about man-eater/man-killer feminists from the West, I think, looking at it, imagining how many women have read this one copy. 'Sometimes I feel like I live on Jupiter, among Jupiterians, and then one day, quite by chance, I discover that I belong to another species. And I discover it in this book. Isn't that wonderful.”
“Yes I don’t like to live here,’ she said, more to herself than me. Then she turned toward me: ‘But if I have learned anything from my life, it’s that since I don’t belong anywhere, only the movement matters.”
“Perhaps to them and their peers their ecological consciousness is a bigger sign of prestige than a fur coat.”
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Book Keywords:
drakulic, communism, feminism, inspirational-attitude, collective-subconscious, history, love-reading, belonging, reading-books, community, public, sharing, nation