Igors

“Он в картинах не европеец, а витебец. Марк Шагал не принадлежит к "культурному миру". ... Так вот, витебские мальчишки все рисуют, как Шагал, и это ему в похвалу, он сумел быть в Париже и Питере витебцем.”
― Victor Shklovsky, Zoo or Letters Not About Love

“What is distinctive about the customs surrounding hospitality in [archaic Greek] culture is that elite men who have entered one another's homes and have been entertained appropriately are understood to have created a bond of "guest-friendship" (xenia) between their households that will continue into future generations. ... It is created not by proximity and kinship, but by a set of behaviors that create bonds between people who are geographically distant from each other. Xenia is thus a networking tool that allows for the expansion of Greek power, from the unit of the family to the city-state and then across the Mediterranean world. It is the means by which unrelated elite families can connect to one another as equals, without having to fight for dominance. ... The poem's episodes can be seen as a sequence of case studies in the concept of xenia.”
― Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

“Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“You want to leave the moat, to go back to the room; you’re already turning and trying to find the door, covered with fake leather, in the steep wall of the moat, but the master succeeds in grabbing your hand and, looking straight in your eyes, says: Your assignment: describe the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a hummingbird, the steeple of the New Maiden Convent, a shoot of bird cherry, the bend of the Lethe, the tail of any village dog, a night of love, mirages over hot asphalt, the bright midday in Berezov, the face of a flibbertigibbet, the garden of hell, compare the termite colony to the forest anthill, the sad fate of leaves to the serenade of a Venetian gondolier, and transform a cicada into a butterfly, turn rain into hail, day into night, give us today our daily bread, make a sibilant out of a vowel, prevent the crash of the train whose engineer is asleep, repeat the thirteenth labor of Hercules, give a smoke to a passerby, explain youth and old age, sing a song about a bluebird bringing water in the morn, turn your face to the north, to the Novgorodian barbicans, and then describe how the doorman knows it is snowing outside, if he sits in the foyer all day, talks to the elevator operator, and does not look out the window because there is no window; yes, tell how exactly, and in addition, plant in your orchard a white rose of the winds, show it to the teacher Pavel and, if he likes it, give the white rose to the teacher Pavel, pin the flower to his cowboy shirt or to his dacha hat, bring joy to the man who departed to nowhere, make your old pedagogue—a joker, a clown, and a wind-chaser—happy.”
― Sasha Sokolov, A School for Fools