Favorite Lines You've Written
This one I wrote in a short story in which a go player was in a match against someone who seemed to be only trying to spoil all his strategies:
The original is in spanish, here's an attempted translation and the original text, for spanish speakers.
Para ese momento había perdido la concentración por completo. Las jugadas me habian sacado de balance a tal punto que ya no sabía lo que estaba haciendo. Respiré profundamente y estudié nuevamente el tablero. Era un juego simple, había coyunturas que podían aprovecharse. Sin embargo, yo no podía continuarla. Sabía que algunas jugadas podrían ponerme a la delantera con facilidad, pero era inconcebiblemente monstruoso para mí hacerlas. Todas ellas reflejaban en su trasfondo algo completamente ajeno a mí. Conté con calma los puntos del tablero; yo iba ganando.
By that time I had lost my concentration completely. The plays had thrown me out of balance to a point in which I didn't know what I was doing. I breathed deeply and studied once again the board. It was a simple game, there were weak spots that could be exploited. Nevertheless, I couldnt' carry on playing. I knew a few plays could make me get ahead with ease, but it was unconceivably monstrous for me to do them. All of them reflected on their background something completely alien to me. I calmly counted the points on the board; I was winning.
From "The Conspiracy of the Ham Sandwich"
What was he cooking that ham for? You guessed it, A ham sandwich.
Behind every major disaster, there's a ham sandwich in there somewhere
World War I got started over a ham sandwich,
Hurricane Katrina? Ham Sandwich.
9/11? Quadruple Ham Sandwich.
I found another one I'd written a while back in a piece of prose meant to visualize the opening of the pilot episode of a sci-fi TV series I hope to produce some day.
Something Gates had told them once came back to him as he flipped it back over to look at the cover again. Something about the reality of war. The reality that they had willingly and whole-heartedly entered into, knowing full well that some of them would not live to see the other side. The reality they now faced every minute of every day; like looking into the face of death and seeing nothing but the inevitability of opportunity and cost.
“There is no glory in the work we do now. We are soldiers; nothing more.” he muttered to himself, quoting one of the few of Gates' speeches he'd actually been around to listen to.
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It takes a village to raise an idiot, but it only takes one idiot to raze a village.
