Gabriel M.

“Are you going to start with the poetry of it?” Ghastron asked softly. “How her hooks are in your soul, so that each sweet breath is naught but wind unless some part of her can feel as you now feel. How every beat of your labouring heart speaks her name, and yet you know it isn’t even her name. That, sans the bounds of contract and the conjurer’s circle, does the thing that fills your life even exist? Or is the one you love solely within your mind, a puppet show played for your own amusement, and in which you strive, ever doubting, to believe?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, House of Open Wounds

“So many places where I‘m not. I‘m not in Naples, in Tangier, Coimbra, Lisbon, New York, Yambol, and Istanbul. Not only am I not there, I am painfully absent. I am not there on a rainy afternoon in London, I am not there in the clamor of Madrid in the evening, I am not in Brooklyn in autumn, I am not there on the empty Sunday streets of Sofia or Turin, in the silence of a Bulgarian town in 1978…”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

“The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

“Off to scout, she said. Off to scavenge, Jack reckoned. Because something burned in her nature that even being left behind by a fleeing army couldn’t douse.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, House of Open Wounds