“... the Orientalist attitude in general [is profoundly anti-empirical]. It shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter.”
― Orientalism
― Orientalism
“I simply want to be dead.
Weeping she left me
with many tears and said this:
Oh how badly things have turned out for us.
Sappho, I swear, against my will I leave you.
And I answered her:
Rejoice, go and
remember me. For you know how we cherished you.”
― If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Weeping she left me
with many tears and said this:
Oh how badly things have turned out for us.
Sappho, I swear, against my will I leave you.
And I answered her:
Rejoice, go and
remember me. For you know how we cherished you.”
― If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
“He was creating the first letters of the Slavonic alphabet. He started with rounded letters, but the Slavonic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly language in them like a bird.”
― Dictionary of the Khazars
― Dictionary of the Khazars
“In fact, they use everyone and have always used everyone, because they are from the old time, the time before all the worlds awoke from a long and mindless night. And these dreams, these things that are called dreams, are still working to throw us back into that great mad darkness, to exhaust each one one of us in our lonely sleep and to use up everyone until death.”
― Noctuary
― Noctuary
“How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same.”
― Mrs. Dalloway
― Mrs. Dalloway
Gennady’s 2025 Year in Books
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