The memories of events and statesmen paled as the years passed. Dust covered them, mud stained them, until they were finally erased as if they had never been. But recently people had come to understand that forgetting was more difficult and complicated than remembering.

I reckoned they had probably begun to pour out their hearts and entrust each other with the subjects of the plays and novels they had written or planned to write. It was customary after serious drinking.

The days went by without incident and often without their name. When you’d unpacked the hours from the day and then the night and piled them all up, you could toss the boxes they came in, which is all that “Wednesday” or “Friday” really are.

Sunday had spread all over the city. It looked as if the sun had smacked into the earth and broken into pieces and chunks of wet light were scattered everywhere – in the streets, on the window panes, on puddles and roofs. I remembered a day long ago when Grandmother had cleaned a big fish. Her forearms were splattered with shiny scales. It was as if she had Sunday in her whole body. When my father got angry, he had Tuesday.

Every passion or wicked thought, every affliction or crime, every rebellion or catastrophe necessarily casts its shadow before it long before it manifests itself in real life.

Their bodies were like corpses ready for embalming, from which all innards likely to rot had already been removed. Superfluous emotions like curiosity, fear and lust for gossip or excitement had been shed along with the useless flesh and excess fat. Javer once said that Granny Shano could as easily have grabbed the ear of Benito Mussolini himself as the Italian officer’s.

Greater Albania?!“, this is a mockery of an unprecedented cynicism.

Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue.

Can a country’s people be better than its planes?

If an animal has to be sacrificed when a new bridge is built, what will it take to build a whole new world?