Цитаты из книги White Teeth

С точки зрения Алсаны, люди разнились не цветом кожи. Не полом, не верой, не умением дергаться под модные ритмы или грести деньги лопатой. Главное различие было фундаментальнее. Оно крылось в земле. И в небе. Человечество легко и четко делилось на два лагеря при помощи простенького теста, вроде тех, что публикуются по вторникам в журнале «Женские секреты»: A) Может ли с неба над вашей головой неделями идти дождь? Б) Может ли случиться так, что земля у вас под ногами будет трястись и разламываться? B) Существует ли вероятность того (отметьте данный пункт, даже если эта вероятность ничтожно мала), что зловещая гора, затеняющая в полдень ваше жилище, вдруг ни с того ни с сего начнет извергать лаву? Если хотя бы на один вопрос вы ответили утвердительно, ваша жизнь — беспросветный кошмар и висит на волоске; она эфемерна, похожа на старую ветошь; она в истинном смысле беззаботна; светла, легковесна — как кольцо для ключей или заколку для волос, ее ничего не стоит потерять. Она похожа на летаргический сон: можно утро, день, год напролет сидеть под кипарисом и чертить на песке восьмерку. А еще такая жизнь сродни бедствию,хаосу:можно вдруг ринуться и свергнуть правительство, выколоть глаза неприятному человеку или сойти с ума и слоняться по городу, что-то бормоча под нос, драть на себе волосы, размахивать руками. Ничто не может вам помешать — и вам может помешатьчто угодно.Вот такое ощущение. И в нем заключена основная разница между людьми. Живущим на твердой земле, под безопасным небом, этого не понять...

'There are no words. The one (son) I send home comes out a pukka Englishman, white suited, silly wig lawyer. The one (son) I keep here is fully paid-up green bow-tie wearing fundamentalist terrorist. I sometimes wonder why I bother,' said Samad bitterly, betraying the English inflections of twenty years in the country, 'I really do. These days, it feels to me like you make the devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started ... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained. Who would want to stay? but you have made a devil's pact ... it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere. And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?'

To Alsana's mind the real difference between people was not colour. Nor did it lie in gender, faith, their relative ability to dance a syncopated rhythm or open their fists to reveal a handful of gold coins. The real difference was far more fundamental. It was in the earth. It was in the sky. You could divide the whole of humanity into two distinct camps, as far as she was concerned, simply by asking them to complete a very simple questionnaire, of the kind you find in Woman's Own on a Tuesday:

(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end? (b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split? (c) Is there a chance (and please tick the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of the term; it is light, losable like a keyring or a hairclip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure of eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hated, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you - or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made. (...)