Sebastián > Recent Status Updates

“He has no faith in principles, but he has faith in frogs.”

"Maybe this is what they are about, these questions of which or whose hole, the right fluids in the wrong places, these infantile confusions and small sadisms: they are a way of fighting our way out of all this meat (I would like to just swim out, you know? – shoot like a word out of my mouth and disappear with a flick of my tail)"

"They are wearing each other away; both of them amazed by the thinness of skin that happens just there; how close they can be, blood to blood, so that the ticking, afterwards, of one inside the other, might be a joke, or a pulse – the beating in your veins of someone else’s heart."

don't know what i expected this book to be but it wasn't a depressed narrator writing artful sex scenes for her dead grandparents

"Nugent thinks of the swell of his glans easing out from its sack of skin and Ada thinks about love, while the hotel clock slips, and softly grinds, and whirrs into the quarter-hour chimes. Dee dee de dee dah! Dah dah de dee dah!"

"If you believe that you can forgive yourself and can attain to this forgiveness in this world, then you believe everything!" Tikhon exclaimed rapturously. "How is it that you say you do not believe in God?"

"Man has done nothing but invent God, so as to live without killing himself; in that lies the whole of world history up to now. I alone for the first time in world history did not want to invent God."

"...abandoning everything tomorrow at daybreak and expatriating abroad! Whoever does not believe that such fantastic things happen in our everyday reality even now, may consult the biographies of all real Russian émigrés abroad. Not one of them fled in a more intelligent or realistic way. It is all the same unbridled kingdom of phantoms, and nothing more."

"It has always seemed to me that you would bring me to some place where there lives a huge, evil spider, as big as a man, and we would spend our whole life there looking at him and being afraid. That's how our mutual love would pass."

"Why destroy such complicated and sophisticated creations as his friends?"

"From behind her ceaseless, genuine, and most complete hatred for you, love flashes every moment, and... madness... [...] What could one more splash of blood mean to you?"

"I thought it was a tree or something. Out there. It never moved, but it didn't look right. I stared at it and... then it moved."

"We say to you: go forward, progress, even shake - all that's old, that is, and has to be remade - but when need be, we will keep you within necessary limits, and save you from yourselves, for without us you will only set Russia tottering"

"I pray to everything. See, there's a spider crawling on the wall, I look and am thankful to it for crawling."

"It seems to me that if there were such a man, for example, as would seize a red-hot bar of iron and clutch it in his hand, with the purpose of measuring his strength of mind, and in the course of ten seconds would be overcoming the intolerable pain and would finally overcome it, this man, it seems to me, would endure something like what was experienced now, in these ten seconds, by Nikolai Vsevolodovich."

"Mysteries! Secrets! Where did we get so many mysteries and secrets all of a sudden?"

this might be the funniest book i've ever read. still getting major characters introduced past the 100-page mark and i'm here for it.

“One life passed, another began, then that passed and a third began, and there’s still no end. All the ends are cut off as if with a pair of scissors.”

"Straight lines - how humiliating they were. How they destroyed the mind. What perfidious geometry, how it makes us into idiots - there and back, a parody of travel. Going forth merely in order to return again. Speeding up just to put on the brakes."

"Scholars have declared the nineteenth century the era of the rise of the common man and the twentieth that of the awakening of women, so the day has passed in which one discussed the New Women merely as a curiosity and regarded the Women Question asa kind of temporary fad."

"I will now set out to describe the somewhat amusing incident with which my chronicle really begins." all in your own good time, D.

an exciting narrative suddenly started around page 30 (was enjoying the memoir-ish musings up to that point), and the pace is fast and the hooks are in, and some villain has only gone and reserved it at the library so i have to go and return it tomorrow. hopefully i can wrestle it back before too long.