Ching Redel

“Nothing looked disturbed…yet everything felt that way. The guy was on the bed, calmness itself, as though he’d decided on a moment’s lie-down and just zizzed off.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows

“During forced exercise one day, Louie fell into step with William Harris, a twenty-five-year-old marine officer, the son of marine general Field Harris. Tall and dignified, with a face cut in hard lines, Harris had been captured in the surrender of Corregidor in May 1942. With another American,* he had escaped and embarked on an eight-and-a-half-hour swim across Manila Bay, kicking through a downpour in darkness as fish bit him. Dragging himself ashore on the Japanese-occupied Bataan Peninsula, he had begun a run for China, hiking through jungles and over mountains, navigating the coast in boats donated by sympathetic Filipinos, hitching rides on burros, and surviving in part by eating ants. He had joined a Filipino guerrilla band, but when he had heard of the American landing at Guadalcanal, the marine in him had called. Making a dash by boat toward Australia in hopes of rejoining his unit, he had gotten as far as the Indonesian island of Morotai before his journey ended. Civilians had turned him in to the Japanese, who had discovered that he was a general’s son and sent him to Ofuna. Even here, he was itching to escape.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

“The fact that you cannot understand it does not mean that it doesn’t exist.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep”
― Albert Camus