Eszter Arató

“There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.”
― Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings

“To cheat fate, Victor signed a three-year contract at a big industrial site two thousand miles away. He reckoned that in three years they’d all forget about him, including Alla, who’d find herself a husband. It was like a temporary suicide, he thought, a thing that everyone desires at some point—to step out for a while, then come back to see what happened.”
― Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories

“Once, at the dacha, years ago,” she said, “we all decided to go mushroom picking, and our neighbor Vera—she was at least eighty at the time—dashed over to the mirror and started painting her lips. My mother said to her, ‘Aunt Vera, we are going to the woods; who’s the lipstick for?’ And Vera replied—I’ll never forget it—‘Who knows? Maybe that’s where it will happen!”
― Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates