Georges Simenon: The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour.

Georges Simenon: Pietr the Latvian

What he sought, what he waited and watched out for was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent . . . 

"Good Lord! Is this the way you search for someone?" she snapped, turning to Maigret. "I'm told you're from the police. My husband may have been killed.... What are you waiting for?"
The heavy gaze that he turned on her was a hundred percent Maigret. Utterly calm. Utterly indifferent. As though he had just heard a fly buzzing. As though he were looking at some completely commonplace object.

Laszlo Kraznahorkai: The Last Wolf and Herman

The love of animals is the one true love in which one is never disappointed.


... for how could he describe what so weighed him down, how could he explain how long ago he had given up the idea of thought, the point at which he first understood the way things were and knew that any sense we had of existence was merely a reminder of the incomprehensible futility of existence, a futility that would repeat itself ad infinitum, to the end of time and that, no, it wasn't a matter of chance and its extraordinary, inexhaustible, triumphant, unconquerable power working to bring matters to birth or annihilation, but rather the matter of a shadowy demonic purpose, something embedded deep in the heart of things, in the texture of the relationship between things, the stench of whose purpose filled every atom, that it was a curse, a form of damnation, that the world was the product of scorn, and god help the sanity of those who called themselves thinkers.


... and whereas our techniques—having realized in the wake of our sorry experiences that we were not questing heroes but merely dumb victims of the thinking mind—were based on paraphiliac fulfillment, unbridled pursuit of pleasure, the ceaseless apocatastasis of an eden missing from primal imagination, and took refuge in transgression, herman's deliberately paltry means were called into being by hubris, a hubris that believed in the invincibility of weakness.


He couldn't write about anything, for really, what could he possibly do with his hopelessly complex, labyrinthine thoughts and sentences, but never mind.

Cixin Liu: Death's End

“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”


“If we lose our human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything.”


“And now we know that this is the journey that must be made by every civilization: awakening inside a cramped cradle, toddling out of it, taking flight, flying faster and farther, and, finally, merging with the fate of the universe as one. The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.”


“Hide yourself well; cleanse well.”


“Because the universe is not a fairy tale.”


On the day of the universe's Last Judgment, two humans and a robot belonging to the Earth and Trisolaran civilizations embraced each other in ecstasy.


“Even Coca-Cola probably tasted medicinal the first time you tried it. Anything addictive is like that.”


“Time is the cruelest force of all.”


“The universe is but a corpse puffing up.”


"Mere existence is already the result of incredible luck. Such was the case on Earth in the past, and such has always been the case in this cruel universe. But at some point, humanity began to develop the illusion that they’re entitled to life, that life can be taken for granted.”


“A bottomless abyss exists in every inch”

Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich (Editors): Airplane Reading

I don’t enjoy flying. The wide range of emotions offered whilst taking off and zipping through the air is a volatile mix of fear, anxiety, dread, boredom, disbelief, and suspicion of every operating system the plane uses. A bump of turbulence ignites my survival instinct that instructs me to grab the nearest object or person and cling to it/them for dear life. When the plane begins its descent a wave of euphoria, hardly felt in my day to day life, cleanses me. I’m released from the funk I’ve been locked in for the past few hours and by the time I’m through customs the ordeal is virtually forgotten. I’ll live to fly again. Oddly enough, what I do enjoy about flying is being in an airport. Glass and concrete Mecca’s of continuous human flow; a conduit of a shared experience that so utterly depends on perspective. There are not many places in the world where so many humans of varied backgrounds, ethnicity, religion, or class convene in one place and do it in peaceful and cooperative terms. Their day to day lives hardly ever untwine; but for a few hours they are united in flight and destination. They may even sit side by side whilst flying and connect with one another. Could the Earth’s socio-political issues be dealt with inside a bustling airport?

Rachel Cusk: Outline

What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.


As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.


Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.


People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.


I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.


What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi: Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide

The naked reality of capitalism is today on display. And it's horrible.


The subject of this book is not merely crime and suicide, but more broadly the establishment of a kingdom of nihilism and the suicidal drive that is permeating contemporary culture, together with a phenomenology of panic, aggression and resultant violence.


Financial capitalism is based on a process of unrelenting deterritorialization, and this is causing fear to spread among those who are unable to deal with the precariousness of daily life and the violence of the labour market. This fear in turn provokes a counter-effect of aggressive re-territorialization by those who try to grasp some form of identity, some sense of belonging, because only a feeling of belonging offers the semblance of shelter, a form of protection. But belonging can only be conclusively proved by an act of aggression against the other, the combined effect of deterritorialization in the sphere of financial capitalism and of re-territorialization in the realm of identity is leading to a state of permanent war.


Now, it is finally crystal clear: resistance is over. Capitalist absolutism will not be defeated and democracy will never be reinstated. That game is over.

Andrei Bitov: Pushkin House

Unreality is a condition of life.


"...But what am I getting at? Why don't you hate the fact that we were forced to grab hold of the same log, the fact that we were cast up on the same island, berthed on the same ship! Why hate me in place of everyone? Here, here!" Mitishatyev jumped up. "These walls here, this banality, these dead men! Whom we, the living, exploit! This age, which forces us to know everything about each other! Because we do know everything! We know so terribly much about each other that--never mind hatred, I can't see why we didn't kill each other, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago! We live on each other, we go to the same latrine, gobble the same corpse of Russian literature and take away the taste of it with the same fixed dinner menu, we use the same monthly ticket to ride the same bus to the same apartment and watch the same TV, drink the same vodka, and use the same newspaper to wrap our solitary herring! Why do you put up with all this, and not with poor little me?"

Thomas Ligotti: Teatro Grottesco

It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.

No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.

Nothing belongs to us. Everything is something that is rented out. Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next.

His trembling words also invoked an epistimology of 'hope and horror', of exposing once and for all the true nature of this 'great gray ritual of existence' and plunging headlong into an 'enlightenment of inanity'...

In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride.

Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.

What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?

This heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as
if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know.

Phil Sandifer: Neoreaction a Basilisk

Let us assume that we are fucked.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Amerikanah

Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.

If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.

If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.

Victor Pelevin: Babylon

In order for him to believe sincerely in eternity, others had to share in this belief, because a belief that no one else shares is called schizophrenia.

How can non-existence get sick of itself?


Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.

Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921 - 1929

There it sinks into a coma between two thin stretches of woods. Day after day passes. More and more empty tins are lying by the side of the train. Crows and magpies gather for the feast in larger and larger flocks. Wasteland ... solitude ... the fox has laid his stealthy tracks to the very train. The engine, one carriage hitched to it, makes daily trips to a larger station to fetch our midday meal and newspapers. Influenza has invaded our compartments. We re-read Anatole France and Klyuchevsky's History .... The cold is 53 degrees below zero. Our engine keeps rolling back and forth . . . to avoid freezing . . . we do not even know where we are.


From this train, through the darkness of night, Trotsky saw Russia for the last time. The train ran through the streets and the harbour of Odessa, the city of his childhood and his first ambitions and dreams of the world. In his memories there always stood out the old Tsarist governor of Odessa who had exercised 'absolute power with an uncurbed temper' and who 'standing in his carriage, fully erect, shouted curses in his hoarse voice across the street, shaking his fist'. Another cursing and hoarse voice and another shaking fist--or was it the same?-now pursued the man in his fiftieth year through the streets of his childhood. Once the sight of the satrap made him shrink, 'adjust the school bag and hurry home'. Now the prison-train hurried through the harbour where he was to embark on a boat which would take him to the unknown; and he could only reflect on the incongruity of his fate.

David King: Russian Revolutionary Posters

Vladimir Sorokin: The Blizzard

Crouper brushed off the snow with his mitten: Glass sparkled. He cleaned the snow off the object. It turned out to be a large, three-bucket, green glass bottle set in a basket holder.

‘So that’s it, yur ’onor. . . .’ Crouper cleared the snow from the enormous bottleneck, and sniffed it. ‘Vodka!’

He kicked the crust of ice on the bottle, knocked it off, and turned it over. Not a drop came out.

‘Drunk up the whole thing, he did,’ Crouper concluded reproachfully.

‘He drank it,’ the doctor agreed, ‘and gave up the ghost right on the road. There you have it, good old Russian stupidity.’ 

Venedikt Erokeev: Moscow to the End of the Line

Oh, that most helpless and shameful of times in the life of my people, the time from dawn until the liquor stores open up!


Everything should take place slowly and incorrectly so that man doesn't get a chance to start feeling proud, so that man is sad and perplexed.


I like the fact that my compatriots have such vacant and protruding eyes. They fill me with virtuous pride. You can imagine what eyes are like (in the capitalist world). ...such eyes look at you with distrust, reflecting constant worry and torment. That's what they're like in the land of ready cash. How different from the eyes of my people! Their steady stare is completely devoid of all tension. They harbor no thought - but what power! What spiritual power! Such eyes would not sell you. They couldn't sell anything or buy anything. You could spit in the eyes, and they’d call it God's (divine) dew...


And toward the evening of the same day, all the world's teletypes received a communication: "Death was a result of natural causes." It wasn't said whose death, but the world surmised.


I've always been in two minds about women, really. On the one hand, I always liked the fact they had waists, and we hadn't. That aroused in me a feeling of - how shall I put it? - well, pleasure. Yes, pleasurable feelings. Still, on the other hand, they did stab Marat with a penknife, and Marat was Incorruptible, so they shouldn't have stabbed him. That fairly killed off the pleasure. Then again, like Karl Marx, I've always loved women for their little weaknesses - i.e. they've got to sit down to pee, and I've always liked that - that's always filled me with - well, what the hell - a sort of warm feeling. Yes, pleasurable warmth. But then again they did shoot at Lenin, with a revolver no less! And that put a damper on the pleasure as well. I mean, fair enough, sitting down to pee, but shooting at Lenin? That's a sick joke, talking about pleasure after that. However, I digress.


Man should not be lonely – that’s my opinion. Man should give of himself to people, even if they don’t want to take. But if he is lonely anyway, he should go through the cars. He should find people and tell them: ‘Look. I’m lonely, I’ll give of myself to the last drop (because I just drank up the last drop, ha-ha!) and you give of yourselves to me and, having given, tell me where are we going. From Moscow to Petushki or from Petushki to Moscow?

Owen Hatherley: Ministry of Nostalgia

Gill sans, muted colours, Blitz spirit, crown logos, wartime cooking, duplicate ration cards...


'Austerity Britain', the period roughly from the 1940s until around 1955, when rationing was finally lifted by a Conservative government, is the direct opposite of ‘Austerity Britain’ Mark Two, the period from 2009/10 until the present when a financial crisis caused by property speculation and ‘derivatives’ culminated in massive state bailouts of the largest banks, followed by an assault on what remained of the public sphere after thirty years of neoliberalism. But this most recent austerity has nonetheless been overlaid with the imagery of that earlier era. At times this has been so pervasive that it felt as if parts of the country began to resemble a strange, dreamlike reconstruction of the 1940s and 1950s, reassembled in the wrong order.


So what emerges particularly clearly from all of this is that austerity - in terms here of developers and investors wanting safety and predictability - has pushed much of the very fabric of London towards an austerity-nostalgic aesthetic. Whereas in very recent memory London seemed to want to look like Dubai-on-Thames, it now increasingly resembles a cross between Islington in the 1820s and Poplar in the 1950s, two moments of austerity and rectitude. [...] Boris Johnson hasn’t the power and certainly hasn’t the will to build thousands of new council flats in London, but what he and his administration have managed to do is help developers build thousands of luxury flats which look like council flats, and can appear to be ‘in keeping’ with them.


In Britain today we are living through exactly the kind of housing crisis for which council housing was invented in the first place, at exactly the same as we’re alternately fetishising and privatising its remnants. From substandard speculative housing development to runaway inflation of mortgages and rents, from resurrected Rachmanism to houses in garden sheds and garages, from empty flats in the north to neo-Victorian overcrowding in the south, from a forced exodus due to to unemployment in one city to a forced exodus due to house prices and rents in another, we face a massive problem for which, once, the solution was the building of well-designed, well-considered, well-planned modernist buildings, often erected on the ashes of shoddily-designed, unplanned, badly made, profit driven housing of the past. Instead, what is actually happening is that we’re transforming the surviving fragments of that solution into one of the main contributors to the problem, as social housing becomes the new front of gentrification, and the architect-designed modernist flat the new loft conversion.


... an architecture voided of its original content - at the very moment when it is most needed.

Vasily Grossman: Life and Fate

Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed - while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.


I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never by conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.


And the greatest tragedy of our age is we don't listen to our consciences. We don't say what we think. We feel one thing and do another.


There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.


There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil - anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.


Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.


When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out. The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.


He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.


And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.


A wife! No one else could love a man who had been trampled on by iron feet. She would wash his feet after he had been spat on; she would comb his tangled hair; she would look into his embittered eyes. The more lacerated his soul, the more revolting and contemptible he became to the world, the more she would love him. She would run after a truck; she would wait in queues on Kuznetsky Most, or even by the camp boundary fence, desperate to hand over a few sweets or an onion; she would bake shortbread for him on an oil stove; she would give years of her life just to be able to see him for half an hour...


Not every woman you sleep with can be called a wife.


He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.

Architekturzentrum Wien Az W: Soviet Modernism 1955-1991: Unknown History

Olga Grushin: The Dream Life of Sukhanov

In anyone's life there can be only a few such moments - moments when a long, ringing hush fills your hearing, the world stands still as if under a magic spell, and thoughts and feelings course freely through your being, traversing the whole of eternity in the duration of a minute, so that when time resumes and you return from whatever nameless, dazzling void you briefly inhabited, you find yourself changed, changed irrevocably, and from then on, whether you want it or not, your life flows in a different direction. This was such a moment for me.


... this stray little thought released in him some echo of the past, a solitary trembling note whose sound rose higher and higher in his chest, awakening inarticulate longings and, inseparable from them, a piercing, unfamiliar sorrow.

Andrei Platonov: Soul

Inside every poor creature was a sense of some other happy destiny, a destiny that was necessary and inevitable -why, then, did they find their lives such a burden and why were they always waiting for something?


Everything in the existing world seemed strange to him; it was as if the world had been created for some brief, mocking game. But this game of make-believe had dragged on for a long time,for eternity, and nobody felt like laughing anymore.

Tor Ulven: Replacement

Man, you wish you had wrinkles. You want to be as old as possible.


It’s not the thought of death. No, that’s not the reason you ache in the springtime, like the chill you get by drinking water after you’ve sucked on a cough drop, although its not really an ache either, but a sorrow, a stab of worry, over what?, you wonder, and continue: over life unlived; not anger or angst about the fact that in the near future you won’t be experiencing anything at all (your fear of death actually decreases as you get older), but the nagging feeling that you haven’t experienced enough, that you’ve never really lived life, and even worse, that it’s too late to experience anything more, or rather, that the experiences you’ve had weren’t the experiences you were meant to have , that somewhere along the way you took a wrong turn, though you can’t say where exactly that was, and now it’s too late, and as a result your life has in one sense been wasted, like a losing game of blind man’s bluff.


The men who are starting their workday or continuing their workday even before the day’s really begun, down there in the scorching heat and metal fumes, you imagine them sweating, toiling away, protecting their eyes with glasses, their heads with helmets, their hands with asbestos gloves, their feet with steel-toed boots, their lungs with dust absorbent cloths, down there in blue-collar hell, clueless idiots tortured body and soul for every red cent, and the worst of it, you think, is that they can’t imagine doing anything else, they can’t even fantasize about living a life without work, they’d never accept a check for sitting on their asses…


What you’ve got to understand is that meaning can be found in meaninglessness, and that these meaningless words hold all that you need to know.

Eduard Limonov: It's me Eddie!

I receive Welfare. I live off your labor: you pay taxes and I don't do shit, twice a month I head down to the clean and spacious welfare office at 1515 Broadway and pick up my check. ... What, you don't like me? You don't want to pay? It's not much—278 dollars a month. You don't want to pay. Well then why the fuck did you get me to come here, me and a whole crowd of Jews? Take it up with your propaganda—it's too strong.