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“Listen, Alyosha, don’t laugh, this is terribly important: is it possible for two different people to have one and the same dream?”
“It must be.”
- Liza Khokhlakov and Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

“In fact you’re not like everyone else: you weren’t ashamed just now to confess bad and even ridiculous things about yourself. Who would confess such things nowadays? No one, and people have even stopped feeling any need for self-judgment. Do not be like everyone else; even if you are the only one left who is not like that, still do not be like that.”
- Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov to Kolya Krasotkin

“And what does it mean—ridiculous? What does it matter how many times a man is or seems to be ridiculous? Besides, nowadays almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”
- Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

“And I am with you, too, I won’t leave you now, I will go with you for the rest of my life,” the dear, deeply felt words of Grushenka came from somewhere near him. And his whole heart blazed up and turned towards some sort of light, and he wanted to live and live, to go on and on along some path, towards the new, beckoning light, and to hurry, hurry, right now, at once!

In certain cases, really, it is more honorable to yield to some passion, however unwise, if it springs from great love, than not to yield to it at all.

“Look at the divine gifts around us: the clear sky, the fresh air, the tender grass, the birds, nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, we alone, are godless and foolish, and do not understand that life is paradise, for we need only wish to understand, and it will come at once in all its beauty, and we shall embrace each other and weep…”
- Zosima

“Truly each of us is guilty before everyone and for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become paradise.”
- Markel

“Do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over.”
- Markel

“I think that if the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
“As well as God, then.”
- Ivan and Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov

“I understand it all too well, Ivan: to want to love with your insides, your guts…I think that everyone should love life before everything else in this world.”
“Love life more than meaning?”
“Certainly, love it before logic…and only then will I also understand its meaning.”
Alexei and Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov

“If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced…that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos…still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I’ve drunk it all!”
- Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov

“Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing! Fearful because it’s undefinable, and it cannot be defined, because here God gave us only riddles. Here the shores converge, here all the contradictions live together…So terribly many mysteries! Too many riddles oppress man on earth.
- Dmitri Fyodorovich Karamazov

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

To be aware of indigenous presence is thus to confront the powerful metaphor of indigenous erasure, an erasure that was established in the first historical accounts of the city…and carried forth by the city’s Franciscan evangelizers and in its official Spanish histories.

Tenochtitlan, the city that they would transform into one of the greatest metropolises of the world, began, as archaeology has revealed, as little more than a series of low-lying atolls in the shallow and swampy saltwater of Lake Tetzcoco, bearing only the slightest resemblance to the ideal of Aztlan. By the fifteenth century, a new Aztlan had been created: the work of human hands.

When talking about Nirvana, it pretty quickly devolved into, “Oh, how was Kurt feeling? What were his drug problems like?” But when Nirvana was onstage, that was not what it was about. It was not about drugs and depression and angst and death. It was about rock and roll as a great big joke.
- Craig Montgomery

The loser ethic is an anti-ethic, and grunge fashion is an antifashion. It’s basically taking all things and putting them on their heads and pretending they’re cool, like the emperor’s wearing no clothes. In this case, we’re saying that the emperor is wearing a flannel shirt.
- Kurt Danielson

I’m not a rock star, I don’t like rock stars, and I don’t want to be around them. That word rock star is really derogatory to me. There seems to be a malicious factor in calling someone that. It’s a put-down.
- Ben Shepherd

The next time I saw those guys, probably a few months later at the Moore Theatre, Eddie was climbing of the P.A. speakers up the side of the wall and jumping headlong into the audience off the balcony. He had acquired his wings. The next show I saw him at, I waded through the people and found him and said, “Hey, Eddie, I hear you can fly!” He just got this big sunshine grin.
- Nancy Wilson

Grunge was an adjective; it was never meant to be a noun. If I was using it, it was never meant to coin a movement, it was just to describe raw rock and roll. Then that term got applied to major-label bands putting out slick-sounding records. It’s an ill fit.
- Mark Arm

We were all starstruck by Kurt even before he was famous because you could tell that he was so gifted. Plus, you kind of just wanted to take him home and take care of him, he just looked so sad and lost at the same time.
- Kelly Canary

Soundgarden had this intensity—the best bands to me just are…in seeing them I thought, the die is cast. This is a band that’s gonna take over the world. Because even at that show, where there were maybe 40 people, you could tell there was a chemistry and a sense of inevitability.
- Jonathan Poneman

People made records entirely to please themselves because there was nobody else to please, there was no one paying attention to Seattle. It was like a little, isolated germ culture.
- Jack Endino

A little further and Granada, the Vega and the Alhambra, were shut from my view and thus ended one of the pleasantest dreams of a life which the reader perhaps may think has been but too much made up of dreams.

How was I to encounter its toils and turmoils, after such a life of repose and reverie? How was I to endure its commonplace, after the poetry of the Alhambra?

The peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace is its power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past, and thus clothing naked realities with the illusions of the memory and the imagination.

From earliest boyhood when on the banks of the Hudson I first pored over the pages of an old Spanish story about the wars of Granada, that city has ever been a subject of my waking dreams, and often have I trod in fancy the romantic halls of the Alhambra.

To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, the Alhambra of Granada is as much an object of veneration as is the Kaaba or sacred house of Mecca to all true Moslem pilgrims. How many legends and traditions, true and fabulous, how many songs and romances, Spanish and Arabian, of love and war and chivalry are associated with this romantic pile!

Much as it spoke to a limited audience, la movida was part of the reinvention of Madrid as a dynamic and expansive capital, one the thousands of children of migrants from other parts of Spain could proudly call their home. Madrid was no longer the remedy to their parents’ lives, but the starting point for their own.

“From the very first moment, Madrid was the city I had been looking for.”
- Julio Llamazares