• In Pharaoh's Army - memories of a lost war
• Slaughterhouse 5
• Monsignor Quixote
• Daphnis und Chloe
• K-Pax
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Down and Out in Paris and London
• The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex
• Ned normal...

In Pharaoh's Army - memories of a lost war
Autor: Tobias Wolff

Nothing could stop it. Except ... what? A breakdown? We'd just have to get on another bus. My pals from the Haight - the Hug Patrol in a human chain across the road? Nah, bunch of softies, they'd never get up this early. Hijackers. A gang of hijackers in front of a barricade, wielding shotguns and pitchforks and clubs, shining bright lights into the driver's eyes. The driver stops. The hijackers pound on the door until he opens it. They come up the steps and down the aisle, flashing their beams from face to face until they find the ones they're after.

They call our names, and then we know who it is behind the blinding lights. It's our fathers. Our fathers, come to take us home.
Crazy.

But not as crazy as what they actually did, which was let us go.

Slaughterhouse 5
Autor: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again: Oh, boy, they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time! And that thought had a brother: 'There are right people to lynch.' Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity.

God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

Monsignor Quixote
Autor: Graham Greene

'I have always thought that the Gospel of St Matthew could be distinguished from the others as the Gospel of fear.'
'Why? What an extraordinary idea, monsignor.'
'In St Matthew there are fifteen references to Hell.'
'What of it?'
'To govern by fear ... surely God can leave that to Stalin or Hitler. I believe in the virtue of courage. I don't believe in the virtue of cowardice.'
'A child has to be educated through discipline. And we are all children, monsignor.'
'I don't think a loving parent would educate by fear.'.

Daphnis und Chloe
Longos, um 200 n.Chr.

in einer Übersetzung aus dem Altgriechischen von Ludwig Wolde
„ ... Ich selbst brannte als Jüngling für Amaryllis und vergaß Essen, Trinken und Schlafen. Meine Seele war krank, gewaltig schlug mein Herz, mein Leib zitterte. Ich jammerte wie einer, den man peitscht, denn war ich wieder stumm wie ein Toter. Ich stürzte mich in jeden Fluss, um mein Feuer zu löschen, rief zu Pan, der für Pitys in Flammen gestanden hatte, pries Echo, die mir den Namen Amaryllis nachsprach, und zerbrach meine Hirtenflöte, weil sie meine Rinder gefügig machten, aber das Mädchen nicht erweichen konnten. Keine Arznei gibt es gegen die Liebe, keinen Trank, keine Speise und kein Zauberlied. Nichts hilft als sich küssen, sich umarmen und nackt beieinander liegen.“

K-Pax
Gene Brewer

Our time ran out just as prot decided to make a trip to one of the K-PAXian libraries. He asked me whether I would like to join him. I said I was sorry, I had some appointments.
“It's your loss,” he said.
After I had awakened him, and before he left my examining room, I asked prot whether he could, in fact, talk to animals, as Giselle and I suspected.
“Of course,” he replied.
“Can you communicate with all our beings?”
“I have a little difficulty with homo sapiens.”
“Can you talk to dolphins and whales?”
“They're beings, aren't they?”
“How do you do that?”
He wagged his head in abject frustration. “You humans consider yourselves the smartest of the EARTH beings. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Then obviously the other beings speak much simpler languages than yours, right?”
“WeIl -”
Out came the notebook, pencil poised. “So if you're so smart, and their languages are so simple, how come you can't communicate with them?” He waited for an answer. Unfortunately, I didn't have one.

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

"A lady?" Jem raised his head. His face was scarlet. "After all those things she said about you, a lady?"
"She was. She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe ... son, I told you that if you hadn't lost your head I'd have made you go read to her. I wanted you to see something about her - I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew."

Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell

"But isn't it very hard to take an interest in things - things like stars - living this life?"
"Screeving, you mean? Not necessarily. It don't need turn you into a bloody rabbit - that is, not if you set your mind to it."
"It seems to have that effect on most people."
"Of course. Look at Paddy - a tea-swilling old moocher, only fit to scrounge for fag-ends. That's the way most of them go. I despise them. But you don't need get like that. If you've got any education, it don't matter to you if you're on the road for the rest of your life."
"Well, I've found just the contrary," I said. "It seems to me that wehen you take a man's money away he's fit for nothing from that moment."
"No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, 'I'am a free man in here'" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right."
Bozo talked further in the same strain, and I listened with attention. He seemed a very unusual screever, and he was, moreover, the first person I had heard maintain that poverty dit not matter.

The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex
Owen Chase

I turned around and saw him, about one hundred rods directly ahead of us, coming down apparently with twice his ordninary speed and, it appeared to me at that moment, with tenfold fury and vengenance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him, and his course toward us marked by white foam a rod in width, which he made with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head was about half out of water, and in that way he came upon and again struck the ship.

Ned normal...
Spitzfindigkeiten von Robert Demmer
Bein Haamfahrn

Wann i länger furt war und kumm haam mit da Bahn,
dann sprechen d‘Stationen mi bsunders stark an.
Wann‘s Salzburg haßt, Linz und Amstetten, St. Pölten,
dann steigt so a freud auf, wia sunst nur ganz seltn.
I grüaß Rekawinkel, Neulengbach, Ha-Wei
und könnt im Moment gar ned glücklicher sei!
Dann Purkersdorf-Gablitz und Maria Brunn,
auf Hütteldorf-Hacking, da scheint no de Sunn...
Und Baumgarten, Penzing, von drübm, gar ned weit
leucht‘t umma de Kirchen von Ober St. Veit!