Autobiography of a Corpse Quotes

“In short, you had that particular ability which I never had: the ability to be alive.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Why frighten little children with the dark when one can quiet them with it and lead them into dreams?”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Hiding my half existence behind the opaque walls of my skull, concealing it like a shameful disease, I did not consider the simple fact that the same thing could be occurring under other skullcaps, in other locked rooms.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“A dingily bilious sun was seeping through a tent of black clouds. Passersby, spitefully elbowing elbows, were rushing along the pavement. People thronging the doorways of shops tried to pummel their way through and stuck fast, their faces flushed with spite and fury, their teeth bared.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Muscovites see clearly but write muddily; the eye grasps but the fingers splay.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“People are ignorant of what any street clock knows. Why? Because the crack that cleaves existence also swallows their existence-reflecting consciousnesses. Thrown back into existence, the poor souls don't suspect that a moment ago they didn't exist - and only isolated things and persons, swallowed by the crack never to return to this world, arouse a certain fear and foreboding.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“the outside world is just a bad habit of the so-called nervous system.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“...as I was sifting through a heap of old and new "identity cards," I noticed that something was missing: my identity.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“A dingily bilious sun was seeping through a tent of black clouds.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“At the time I...loved someone. Now I wouldn't know how.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Here, in the city, associations tend to be strangely uniform: An association by similarity (especially an inner, essential similarity) is rare and almost unachievable. Here the barbershops all trim moustaches the same way, dress shops all button women into much the same styles, bookshop windows display all the same book covers - all billed as THE LATEST THING! From nine to ten every morning four-fifths of the total number of eyes are hidden behind newssheets identical down to the last misprint. No, here in the city, if you make associations by similarity, you're bound to confuse everything (the familiar with the unfamiliar, today with yesterday), to grow melancholy, and to even go mad.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“But it's fair to say that the war's [WWI] dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. And if the war managed only to separate the living from the dead, then the new regime, arriving in its wake, would sooner or later pit them against each other as enemies.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“But whatever dies unspent, before its time, will not be still even in death. Hence the fundamental paradox of Moscow: What is dead is not entirely dead, what is alive is not fully alive, because how can anyone live among myriads of deaths, among such uncorpse-like corpses, which, though fast asleep, keep tossing under their blankets of sod. Moscow is the old folktale about the water of life and death, but told by a taleteller who has got it all backward: The living are sprinkled with the water of death, the dead with the water of life, and no one can tell who’s alive, who’s dead, and who should bury whom.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“It was then that that ultimate loneliness, known to only a few of the living, would begin, when you are left not only without others but without yourself.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Human love is a frightened thing with half-shut eyes: It dives into the dusk, skitters about in dark corners, speaks in whispers, hides behind curtains, and puts out the light.

I do not begrudge the sun. Let it peek—so long as I am there too—under the unsnapping snaps. Let it peep through the window. That doesn’t bother me.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Patience—you’ll get your share of the earth. Width—from shoulder to shoulder; length—from crown to soles; and for now you have the cheer of your own tiny sun, the diameter of a ten-kopeck coin.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Yes, I am a resident of minus-Moscow. This city, from which I have yet to be banished, in which I still have my quadrature and my rights, is a city not of things but of reflections. Into it, as into the watery depths, have tumbled all the overturned surfaces, shapes, and “covers” of things. If I am a man who can have only minuses, I try to believe in minuses. It will do me no good, you see, no good at all to repeat after others: Things cast shadows. No, in my minus-city, in my ghostly, minusy little world, only minus-truths make sense—only facts that have fallen on their heads. Therefore, shadows cast things. That’s right, and no one disputes this in my excluded-from-the-world world. I manage as best I can among my minuses and shadows; cut off by closed doors, I cross them out with the thought: If from that other world I may have nothing but surfaces, shadows, lies, and covers, then I have the right to suspect that inside all those covers are lies and that all their things are shadows of my shadows.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“People whom Moscow has tried in its courts and banished from the city are said to have been sentenced to “minus 1.” No one has passed sentence on me: 0–1. I am still here, in the hodgepodge and hubbub of the capital. Yet I am fully and firmly aware: I have been banished forever and irrevocably from all things, from all joys, from all truths. Though I walk, look, and listen beside others settled in this city, I know: They are in Moscow and I am in minus-Moscow. I am permitted only the shadows of things; things are beyond my reach; coins skipping from palm to palm give me only their thin, high-pitched tinkle; I am allowed encounters and conversations only with the emptiness that early-morning trams, bells jangling through the gloom, let carefully on and off; all the doors open to others are closed to me, while everything behind them is almost transcendental.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Again I thought: Man is to man a wolf. No, that’s not true, that’s sentimental, lighthearted. No, man is to man a ghost. Only. That’s more exact. To sink one’s teeth into another man’s throat is at least to believe—and that’s what counts—in another man’s blood. But there’s the rub: Man ceased to believe in man long ago, even before he began doubting God. We fear another man’s existence the way we fear apparitions, and only very rarely, when people glimpse each other in the gloaming, do we say of them: They’re in love. No wonder lovers seek out a nighttime hour, the better to envision each other, an hour when ghosts are abroad. It is amusing that the most optimistic of all philosophers, Leibniz, could see only a world of discrete monads, of ontological solitudes, none of which has windows. If one tries to be more optimistic than the optimist and avow that souls have windows and the ability to open them, then those windows and that ability will turn out to be nailed shut and boarded up, as in an abandoned house. People-monads, too, have a bad name: They are full of ghosts. The most frightening of these is man.

Yes, blessed are the wolves, for they believe at least in blood.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“So I’m a corpse. So be it. But I too shall see the sun at the hour of my burial.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“... he divided the books into two piles.
"These went past. Those went through.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“A point in space may be found, they say, only by means of intersecting coordinates. But should those coordinates come apart, then... space is vast, while a point has no size at all. Evidently my coordinates had come apart, and to find me, a psychic point in infinity, turned out to be impossible”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“THE ECONOMIC barometer at Harvard University had consistently pointed to bad weather. But even its precise readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its own energies. Oil wells were running dry. Black, white, and brown coals were producing less and less power every year. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snowcaps melted by the perennial summer could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine generators would stop. The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun’s yellow whips, it whirled around like a dervish dancing his last delirious dance.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“THIS WHOLE story would have remained hidden under the starched cuff and sleeve of a jacket, if not for the Weekly Review. The Weekly Review came up with a questionnaire (Your favorite writer? Your average weekly earnings? Your goal in life?) and sent it out to all subscribers. Among the thousands of completed forms (the Review had a huge circulation), the sorters found one, Form No. 11111, which, wander as it would from sorter to sorter, could not be sorted: On Form No. 11111, opposite “Average Earnings,” the respondent had written “0,” and opposite “Goal in Life,” in clear round letters, “To bite my elbow.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Релсовите сглаби отмерваха стакатото на пътя. Една фуражка, висяща с козирката надолу от куката на стената, се полюшваше насам-натам, сякаш се опитваше да изтърси мигренозна болка от сукнените си слепоочия." - "Глуха линия”
― Сигизмунд Кржижановски, Автобиография на един труп

“Wherever you look, everything is in a row: a seven-story pile abutting a three-windowed log hut hard by a fantastical L-shaped mansion; ten paces from its columns is an outdoor market; farther on, a polluted pissoir; farther still, the white light of a belfry's tent roof, fringed cupolas rising into the blue - and, towering over the tiny church, another enormous edifice gleaming with fresh paint. Moscow is a mishmash of utterly unrelated (logically and optically) building ensembles, of large and small houses crammed from cellar to eaves with utterly unrelated offices, apartments, people living apart, at odds, past one another, yet separated only by thin walls, often plywood that doesn't reach the ceiling. In Moscow people and their paraphernalia are close to each other not because they are close but because they are side by side, cheek by jowl.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse