Petronius Jablonski > Quotes

“This is the cardinal virtue of an Objective narrative. Given its timeless nature, there is no need to assemble it with rackets and ruses. With the envy of eunuchs and ingenuity fanned by resentment, men incapable of profound insights deny the Objective nature of the written word in the despairing hope of dissuading those who know the Truth and have the courage to write it.

I, Petronius Jablonski, hereby forbid any and all Freudian, structural, post-structural, post-post-structural, post-colonial, post-anything analysis or deconstruction of my annals and condemn any and all such enterprises. All theorizing based on class, gender, and ethnicity is strictly prohibited.

An Objective narrative is not a Rorschach blot for one to project his pathologies and sundry whines. If the Reader insists on “reading into” the narrative, he should fill the margins with sketches of penises, vaginas, and stick-figures engaged in coitus.”
― Petronius Jablonski, The Annals of Petronius Jablonski: An Odyssey of Historic Proportions and Priceless Treasure of Philosophy

“She’s laughing. Do you hear that?” “We’re poised to capture the greatest beast since the T. rex and you’re intimidated by a maid.” “Está usted ocupado?” “Dammit. Hide this stuff before she cleans. She’ll think we’re in the middle of some mega gayfest.” “Well we’re not.” “But that’s the kind of shit biographers write about,” says Gilbert. “They’ll talk to everyone who saw us before we went up.” “History is going to be very kind to us. I can feel it.”
― Petronius Jablonski, Mount Silenus: A Vertical Odyssey of Extraordinary Peril

“A great book you don’t read is a friend you’ll never meet.”
― Petronius Jablonski, Mount Silenus: A Vertical Odyssey of Extraordinary Peril

“You’ve been robbed. Those times, where did they go? Once so alive but now hidden in a mass grave. And that’s where the future ones are headed. Remember that. All the days to come will vanish thus. What value or meaning can they contain? We are hoarders of dust.”
― Petronius Jablonski, Schrodinger's Dachshund: A Novel of Espionage, Astounding Science, and Wiener Dogs

“With polite obstinacy he spurns vendors who offer “authentic relics” made of baked manure. “No gracias,” he says, waving a bony finger. Not lost but found in the silent majesty of this crypt of a civilization he spends his days in pursuit of phantoms, guided by a phantom map and at the behest of connections linked by the unrelenting velocity of phantom logic. But his joy is real. Amid dark stains of misery, smeared within a pastiche of solemnity, hilarity, and tedium, the newfound purpose adds a streak of gold to the collage of his life. And like all men he mistakes the fleeting nuance for the color of the underlying canvas.”
― Petronius Jablonski, Schrodinger's Dachshund: A Novel of Espionage, Astounding Science, and Wiener Dogs

“How could waiting to die be the lesser evil?”
― Petronius Jablonski, Mount Silenus: A Vertical Odyssey of Extraordinary Peril

“The stars, are they not confetti? There is a direct relation between the number of them and the triviality of you. Squint your eyes. The constellation of a long slender hound appears, marking the heavens more objectively than dippers or crabs or bowmen. Trace it with your finger. The dog glares as if perturbed by your discovery. Heaven is not a Rorschach after all.

Perhaps the ancients didn’t name him for a reason, or only spoke the name during ceremonies where his guidance was sought, his wrath placated. They looked to the stars and the stars looked back. What became of them? Survival was not among the blessings from this deity. His ferocity makes him more humanlike than one of love. Close your eyes and seize the earth. So solid. So flat and stationary. Your senses are liars and fools.

“What about those other universes he was talking about?” you whisper, assuming the fetal position. It worked once. “Screw it. All politics is local. As long as they aren’t connected they don’t dilute the significance of this one.”

The hound in the sky continues to scowl, as he did before you were born, before all men were born.”
― Petronius Jablonski, Schrodinger's Dachshund: A Novel of Espionage, Astounding Science, and Wiener Dogs

“The door opens a crack, sucking Time from the room like air from a ruptured plane. “Hello? It’s maid.” In an instant she will know eternity heretofore was all about her, though you’ve gone to modest lengths to create another interpretation. The mist of equivocality can be a blessing as well as a nuisance. She enters, her mustache full and dark, her pockmarks cavernous, her body squat and gnarled like some tree stump struck by lightning. The hideous troll cackles and says, “I come back,” and shuts the door. The”
― Petronius Jablonski, Mount Silenus: A Vertical Odyssey of Extraordinary Peril

“Men go to absurd lengths explaining the problem of evil. In the process they sound like half-wit attorneys defending a mass-murderer. They say happenstance is a robber, free will a mixed blessing, joy more abundant than pain. Look deeper. There is a mighty force opposing our every plan, a cruel gravity smothering us, the heel of a boot grinding out the embers of our souls, a sadist cloaked in the dark fabric of existence. It is the implacable colossus of Fate. We scarcely have time to stumble onto the battlefield, much less comprehend our plight and mount a counterattack. In a few twinklings of the sun, on a day no different than all that came before, the cosmic ogre squashes us. Those convulsive growls that rend the sky, they are not thunder. They are laughter.” He”
― Petronius Jablonski, Mount Silenus: A Vertical Odyssey of Extraordinary Peril

“In any dispute, it profits one if his adversary thinks him less than fully stable”
― Petronius Jablonski, The Annals of Petronius Jablonski: An Odyssey of Historic Proportions and Priceless Treasure of Philosophy

“Did you know the bear is one of the most spiritual animals on earth,” says a man beside them. His vaguely English words struggle to emerge through an eastern European shell. “This is due to the omega-3 fatty acids they consume.” “My mom takes those pills,” says Gaspar. “She’s always praying.”
― Petronius Jablonski, Mount Silenus: A Vertical Odyssey of Extraordinary Peril

“An ant crawls across a sliver of sun on the concrete, from darkness into a patch of light back into darkness. Sound like anyone you know? Others follow, their paths labyrinthine, their obscurity abrupt. Far above, contingent and transitory as ants and cursed with the fragility this entails, the cluster of gasses recently nicknamed the sun seeps across the boneyard of Time toward its own demise.”
― Petronius Jablonski

“An ant crawls across a sliver of sun on the concrete, from darkness into a patch of light back into darkness. Sound like anyone you know? Others follow, their paths labyrinthine, their obscurity abrupt. Far above, contingent and transitory as ants and cursed with the fragility this entails, the cluster of gasses recently nicknamed the sun seeps across the boneyard of Time toward its own demise.”
― Petronius Jablonski, Some Call It Trypophobia

“..few spectacles are more instructive than a child bullying another. This behavior is not taught and cannot be suppressed. Pick a period in history. Any. Read about the wars the gruesome tactics, how the victors treated the vanquished. These are patterns in the grain of human nature.”
― Petronius Jablonski, Some Call It Trypophobia

“Our bloodlust to destroy as much of Nature as possible will be exposed for what it is: the jealous rage of a failed artist bent on destroying the one standard against which his tinkerings will always seem derivative, tawdry, laughable, as nothing at all.”
― Petronius Jablonski, Some Call It Trypophobia

“Crisp leaves enshroud Milwaukee, never as beautiful in life as they are in death. All rejoice in the tomb of summer, frolicking in the burial ground of a time that is no more. This remorseless decomposition, land of nostalgia and déjà vu, idyllic for football and hunting and lakefront bonfires at night, it calls from a place beyond instinct, one primal or mystical and ineptly mapped by our concepts. If Nature speaks through her patterns, what are we to make of this delirious paean to necrophilia, this hypnotic Ode to Mortality?”
― Petronius Jablonski, Schrodinger's Dachshund: A Novel of Espionage, Astounding Science, and Wiener Dogs

“The Abominable Unau, thirty feet tall it lurches toward you, sickle claws protruding from furry stumps, long front legs stretching like the arms of a witch reaching across a table to read a palm. Through veils of snow appears a nose with the contours and padding of a leather recliner, infringing on space that should have been reserved for its tiny eyes.

Allegedly erased from the ledger of life, presumed to have plunged into that mass grave awaiting us all, it stands triumphant, in absolute defiance of Time and Nature and all man’s theories and measurements, which measure nothing at all, not even man. The wind howls in disbelief at this zombie returned from the dead. It throws back its head and makes a deep gurgling noise that sends tremors across the ground.

In lieu of girding your loins, you wet them. It stoops until its nose is inches from your face. The breeze from its inhalation sucks your hair straight up. How do you appear to it, as the pinnacle of creation, the raison d’être of existence, the summon bonum of Being, a member of the almighty species who spread its fungal growth to the moon, erecting temples to vanity in the dark heavens? Does it know man hath dominion over it, or does it see a bug too big to eat in one bite?”
― Petronius Jablonski, Mount Silenus: A Vertical Odyssey of Extraordinary Peril