D. Pow

“Nobody knew literature and history better than these people, nobody could write better Russian than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly. For these characters civilization meant more than daily bread and a nightly hug. This wasn’t, as it would seem, another lost generation. This was the only generation of Russians that had found itself, for whom Giotto and Mandelstam were more imperative than their own personal destinies. Poorly dressed yet somehow still elegant…broken, growing old, they still retained their love for the non-existent (or existing only in their balding heads) thing called ‘civilization.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Every man's death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Skating Rink

“My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Irish Impressions