Olga Bubich > Olga's Quotes

“It had to be that Americans were taught, from elementary school, to always "say something" in class, no matter what. [...] They never said "I don't know". They said, instead, "I'm not sure," which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge. And they ambled, these Americans, they walked without rhythm. They avoided giving direct instructions: they did not say "Ask somebody upstairs"; they said "You might want to ask somebody upstairs". When you tripped and fell, when you choked, when misfortune befell you, they did not say "Sorry". They said "Are you OK?" when it was obvious that you were not. And when you said "Sorry" to them when they choked or tripped or encountered misfortune, they replied, eyes wide with surprise, "Oh, it's not your fault". And they overused the world "excited", a professor excited about a new book, a student excited about a class, a politician on TV excited about a law; it was altogether too much excitement.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“...стремление к счастью, которое также можно назвать жизнью, наполнено удивительными временными составляющими - мы оказываемся там, куда и думать не могли добраться, обогатившись по пути, но оставаться там мы не можем, ведь мир этот нам не принадлежит, и мы не должны допустить, чтобы он столкнулся с тем миром, в котором для нас есть место.”
― Джанет Уинтерсон, Зачем быть счастливой, если можно быть нормальной?

“Сказки учат тому, что стандартного размера не существует: это иллюзия промышленной эпохи, доставляющая немало хлопот фермерам, которые пытаются поставлять в супермаркеты овощи одинаковой формы и веса... [...]

Легенды о богах, что являются в человеческом обличье - масштабированные в своей божественной силе до размеров человека, - это еще и рассказы о том, что нельзя судить по внешности - ведь все не то, чем кажется на первый взгляд.

Мне кажется, что быть собственному миру по размеру и осознавать, что и ты, и твой мир - величины отнюдь не постоянные - ценный ключ к пониманию того, как следует жить.”
― Джанет Уинтерсон, Зачем быть счастливой, если можно быть нормальной?

“Мне грустно оттого, что на свете так много детей, о которых никто не позаботился, и они так и не смогла вырасти. Постарели, но так и не выросли. Для этого нужна любовь.”
― Джанет Уинтерсон, Зачем быть счастливой, если можно быть нормальной?

“Покинуть дом можно лишь в том случае, если он у вас был. Уйти из лома означает не только географически или пространственно отделиться, нет, это также значит отделиться эмоционально, хотите вы этого или нет. Навсегда или с возможностью вернуться.

Для беженцев и бездомных отсутствие этой критически важной координаты в пространстве имеет серьезные последствия. В лучшем случае можно каким-то образом решить проблему, компенсировать ее. В худшем - перемещенное лицо оказывается совершенно дезориентировано. Нет ни севера, ни стрелки компаса. Дом - это намного больше, чем место, где можно укрыться; дом - это наш центр притяжения.”
― Джанет Уинтерсон, Зачем быть счастливой, если можно быть нормальной?

“We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”
― Primo Levi

“...автор - это прежде всего человек, присутствующий в своих книгах, и в конечном счете не так уж и важно, хорошо или плохо он пишет, главное - чтобы писал и действительно присутствовал в своих книгах...”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“Оказалось, что я не способен жить ради самого себя, а ради кого еще я мог бы жить? Человечество меня не интересовало, более того, внушало мне отвращение, я вовсе не считал всех людей братьями, особенно если рассматривать достаточно узкий фрагмент человечества, состоящий, например, из моих соотечественников или бывших коллег. При этом, как ни досадно, я вынужден был признать этих людей себе подобными, и именно это сходство и побуждало меня избегать их; хорошо бы мне найти женщину, это было бы классическим и проверенным решением вопроса, женщина, разумеется, тоже человек, но все же она являет собой несколько иной тип человека и привносит в жизнь легкий аромат экзотики.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“… in the fascist imagination, the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal gender roles… The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology – authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity and struggle. … While fascist politics fetishizes the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishized. These invented histories also diminish or entirely extinguish the nation’s past sins. It is typical for fascist politicians to represent a country’s narrative concocted by liberal elites and cosmopolitans to victimize the people of the true “nation”. [...] When it does not simply invent a past to weaponize the emotional of nostalgia, fascist politics cherry-picks the past, avoiding anything that would diminish unreflective adulation of the nation’s glory”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“... ностальгия ведь отнюдь не эстетическое чувство, она даже не связана со счастливыми воспоминаниями, мы испытываем ностальгию по какому-то месту просто потому, что там жили, хорошо ли, плохо ли - не важно, прошлое всегда прекрасно, будущее, кстати, тоже; причиняет боль только настоящее, и мы носим его в себе, словно некий гнойник страданий, ни на минуту не покидающий нас в промежутке между двумя бескрайними полосами чистого счастья.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“Democratic citizenship requires a degree of empathy, insight, and kindness that demands a great deal of all of us. There are easier ways to live.

For example, we can reduce our public engagement to consumption, viewing our labour as whatever we need do to enter the consumer marketplace with money in our pockets, free to choose our widgets, to shape an identity based upon consumption.

Or we can go global and expand our understanding of “us” by wandering the world and appreciating its cultures and wonders, considering both the people living in the refugee camps of the world and the residents of small towns of Iowa to be our neighbours, while maintaining a connection with our own local traditions and duties.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Fascist politics replaces reasoned debate with FEAR and ANGER. When it is successful, its audience is left with a destabilized sense of loss, and a well of mistrust and anger against those who it has been told are responsible for this loss. Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncement of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Children can certainly be taught to hate, but to affirm hatred as a dimension of socialization has unintended consequences. Does anyone really want their children’s sense of identity to be based on a legacy of marginalization of others?”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“Хасиды рассказывают историю о грядущем мире, который гласит, что все там будет таким же, как здесь. Такая же комната, как у нас теперь; где спит сейчас наш ребенок, он будет спать и в грядущем мире. Одежду, которую мы носим здесь, мы будем носить и там. Все будет как сейчас, только чуть-чуть по-другому.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“By refusing to be bewitched by fascist myths, we remain free to engage one another, all of us flawed, all of us partial in our thinking, experience, and understanding, but none of us demons.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we await for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What can one think about? One cannot think anymore, it is like being already dead. Someone sits down on the ground. The time passes drop by drop.”
― Primo Levi, If This is a Man: Remembering Auschwitz

“When we finish, everyone remains in his own corner and we do not dare lift our eyes to look at one another. There is nowhere to look in a mirror, but our appearance stands in front of us, reflected in a hundred livid faces, in a hundred miserable and sordid puppets. We are transformed into the phantoms glimpses yesterday evening.

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower that this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.”
― Primo Levi, If this is a Man. 2004

“Может быть, просодия и грамматика - тот материал, из которого мы творим социум, способ организации смысла и времени, не принадлежащий никому по отдельности, но циркулирующий сквозь нас всех?”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“Художник должен предлагать нечто большее, чем выдержанное в том или ином стиле отчаяние.”
― Ben Lerner, 10:04

“The confusion of languages is a fundamental component of the manner of living here: one is surrounded by a perpetual Babel, in which everyone shouts orders and threats in languages never heard before, and woe betide whoever fails to grasp the meaning. No one has time here, and no one has patience, no one listens to you; we latest arrivals instinctively collect in the corners, against the walls, afraid of being beaten.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.”
― Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“The Soviet system aimed to strip its subjects of the ability to choose. The course of history was preordained, and so was the course of human life. Any Soviet citizen who sought to control his own destiny came up against trade-offs. .... Most Soviet citizens, I think, never questioned this system or their own role in it.”
― Masha Gessen, Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace

“Memory is a curious instrument: ever since I have been in the camp, two lines written by a friend of mine a long time ago have been running through my mind:

«… Until one day
There will be no more sense in saying: tomorrow».

It is like that here. Do you know how one says “never” in camp slang? «Morgen früh,» tomorrow morning.”
― Primo Levi, If this is a Man. 2004

“Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”
― Primo Levi

“Линн прекрасна в своей печали. Ее бойфренд годами будет гулять с ней по ночам, в надежде увидеть ее улыбку. Я всегда полагала, что ребятам нравятся веселые, контактные и остроумные девушки. Но, как правило, куда действеннее мрачно смотреть фильм о дикой природе и заставлять мужчину гадать, о чем ты думаешь после секса.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man • The Truce

“It is now the hour of “links, links, links and links”, the hour in which one must not lose step. Kraus is clumsy, he has already been kicked by the Kapo because he is uncapable of walking in line: and now he is beginning to gesticulate and chew a miserable German, listen, listen, he wants to apologize for the spadeful of mud, he has not yet understood where we are, I must say Hungarians are really a most singular people.
To keep step and carry on a complicated conversation in German is too much. This time it is I to warn him that he has lost step; I look at him and I see his eyes behind the drops of water on his glasses, and they are the eyes of the man Kraus.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce

“Если ты "творческая личность", можешь пренебречь дресс-кодом. Люди подумают, что ты мыслишь шире, и внезапно смутятся.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"