Andrej Bjelakovic

“Children are - and this seems to be a cultural if not a biological necessity - terrorised by the adult experience of life, which, glimpsing it obliquely, at times of stress, and in fragments which makes no sense, they try to ignore. Many fantasy and sf readers are living out a prolonged childhood in which they retain that terror and erect- in collusion with professional writers who themselves often began as teenage daydreamers - powerful defences against it.

Thus they prefer fiction which, like "hard" sf, ignores adult experience or ropes it off in a reductivist way; or which, like fantasy and horror fiction, diffuses and defuses it through fairytale and myth; or - perhaps most characteristically since the New Wave, "inner space" and the soft sciences- which generalises and
politicises it. (Post New Wave readers, especially those who consider themselves most adult and intelligent in their use of the genre, seem not to fear experience so much as individual experience. They are not frightened of life so much as life's particularity. The trap is circular. The less you engage your own adult experience, the less you value it, and the more you tend to rely on
systematic ideological validations of it. This is no better than the school playground, with its establishmentally validated experiences and sociative norms, you believe you have left behind.)”
― M. John Harrison

“Bigend, a formidable practitioner of the other side of this dance, seems genuinely incapable of imagining that others wouldn't want to do whatever it is that he wants them to. Margot had cited this as both the most problematic and, she admitted, most effective aspect of his sexuality: He approached every partner as though they already had slept together. Just as, Cayce was now finding, in business, every Bigend deal was treated as a done deal, signed and sealed. If you hadn't signed with Bigend, he made you feel as though you had, but somehow had forgotten that you had.
There was something amorphous, froglike, about his will: It spread out around you, tenuous, almost invisible; you found yourself moving, mysteriously, in directions other than your own.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Za štrikliranje pasoša sam k znanju primio. Ne tiče me se. Dok je Aleksandar, u Srbiju neću dolaziti. U veću me brigu baca što zabranjuju skupove. A kod nas, gde nema gužve, nema ni smutnje. Srbi nisu, kao Romeji, pogodni za dogovore, sozokletija, tajna društva. Srpska Heterija je nemoguća. Oni su više za naprečac dizanje i svršavanje stvari usput. U smislu toga da krenu na litiju, a završe paljevinom Dvora. U toj osebini valja i tražiti lek belaju sa zakonom protiv zborovanja i dogovaranja. Da l’ se opominješ propalog projekta da dignemo bunu pod vidom sakupljanja potpisa za povratak iz internacije onih propalica, Vučića i Petronijevića?”
― Borislav Pekić, Zlatno runo 4

“Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line... Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had been given a few weeks' rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless.”
― Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That