As we know, blackboards are where teachers write lessons and students pay attention. This simple technology facilitates the giving and receiving of knowledge. The blackboard cannot be separated from the teacher. It is their first and last sign, like the flag in a scene of defeat. 

Justice, the formulation of which is always unfinished, constantly produces thrilling stories, grand ideals, strong desires, and violence.

Historians note how Napoleon managed to change France, Europe and other parts of the world. After the French Revolution ended the feudal order, he, a revolutionary army officer, emerged as ‘Consul’ from the political ruins.

Yes, death and cruelty do not disappear because of One Thousand and One Nights, but life can be better because of stories and their tellers.

The ‘Malay world’ in this novel is not a closed, impenetrable world. In this novel at least, that kind of world does not become ‘local color’. Usually in literary criticism, what is called ‘local color’ is something identifiable—because it is whole, homogenous and distinctive: descriptions of landscape, customs and local dialects used in the story.

Kartini’s language, the language of a 20-year-old, is like a storm, although not immediately evident. It is not linear, or flat. Hyperbole arises in many sections, particularly when she mentions something (or someone) that she likes. Exclamation marks abound.

The coast is the world to be viewed, with curiosity and wonder, from a distance—from the outside.

Taman Mini reflects the view that life is only the status quo—as though in every phenomena, every difference, there is only the everlasting.

Flesh, eyes, skin—the physical and the psychic—have shaped the language of racist violence. In Indonesia, too.

Now Covid-19 can remind us that intimacy with the flesh is the same as simple gratitude when one is healthy, and taking an easy attitude towards pain and death.

The past does not stop. Over and again, we fail to recapture it in memory. Of course, we have history books and think that this is where the past is recorded as memory. But memory is the product of the present, and the present is not a station where memories pause, unchanging. This is why we often try to recall the past in other ways.

Revenge, retaliation, and dark characters make us feel something more than just addiction to stories of violence; we feel that we are discovering stories about ‘justice’, and turn them into moral discourse.

Tempo was born and changed the magazine scene. Previously, weeklies were like convenience stores.

His diary is not a monologue, and not a soliloquy: even in the narrowest of cells and in the most cruel oppression—particularly in Nusabambangan, the camp that was actually even worse than Buru—his voice was one of many. 

The phrase "the desert of the real" conveys that ‘the real’ is the destroyed world, gloomy, fantastical, inexplicable through language, especially when viewed from the ordered world. In Indonesia, we are actually in that ‘desert’: with incessant floods, landslides and earthquakes.

Death is always with us in the same carriage. Death does not cut the journey. Death is part of the journey.

With the technology of the Hubble telescope, we see that we inhabit merely one tiny planet in a galaxy, while there are two trillion galaxies sprinkled in space. Humans are not the center.

The ondel-ondel, which people say used to be part of high-class ceremony in old Jayakarta, is nowadays part of the life of the impoverished, who know they are not in the limelight.

Viruses are wars without borders. There is no space or time that can be completely ordered and stabilized in indices and maps. Contagion and healing go on within traces of differing attitudes towards life, sickness, and death.

The eye – unlike the ear – does indeed absorb things field by field, not all at once. Sight becomes king. Humans no longer know objects by hearing, tasting and feeling them.