blow [Theme]

“With America's abysmally low economic growth,” writes Time magazine, “we can't even save ourselves from 9 percent unemployment in our own country, much less begin to save the world.”

Behind-the-scenes ballet intrigues taught Polina a harsh rule: no one should know anything unnecessary about you. Or better yet, they don’t know anything at all. If you open it even a little bit, you will instantly receive a blow, predators will rush in, grab onto the soft meat and tear at the living meat until they bite you to death.

It's not difficult to fight. It's hard to just start and finish. When you have already started, then instinct kicks in. The most difficult thing in any violence is to strike the first blow and, having gained the upper hand, stop in time and not strike the last one.

Fate is not always favorable to us, but what makes us strong is how we can withstand its blow. It doesn’t matter whether you are a mortal man or the King of Kings. Everyone is equal before fate.

Everyone gets a stab in the finger while learning to hammer nails.

A precision strike in boxing, like a biting aphorism in prose, has the same deafening effect.

Patriotism is the religion of the rabid, Oscar Wilde used to say. [A blow to the neck followed] Thank you for proving me right.

This is not just a blow to the image of the city police, it is a setup. For me personally.

The awareness of the inevitability of death came to me early, at the age of thirteen or fourteen. The French literary critic Charles du Bose, Edith Wharton's friend and translator, coined a clever phrase for this: le réveil mortel. What's the best way to translate? “Death Alarm Ring” is a bit from the field of hotel services. “Death-knowledge”, “awakening to death” - smacks too much of German philosophy. "Awareness of death"? - but this suggests a condition rather than a pinpoint lightning strike. In a sense, the bad (first) translation of Dubosov’s expression fits best: it’s really as if you are in an unfamiliar hotel room, where your predecessor left the alarm clock set, and at a monstrous early hour you are suddenly torn from sleep into the darkness of the morning by panic fear and cruel realization that in this world you are just a guest.

Every beat of your heart is proof that someone loved you.

You need to be valiant for your own sake and for the sake of the advantage that consists in mental firmness, confidently resisting all blows of fate.

Slightly sick.

Knockout...

At the beginning of 1942, the Japanese dealt another powerful blow to the allies ... in Singapore, which was part of the British Empire. There were more British troops here than in England itself. 80,000 troops, most of them Australians, were captured. But the true feelings of the inhabitants of the colonies became clear when, out of 55,000 captured soldiers of the Indian army, 40,000 went over to the side of the Japanese.