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.
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.
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.
“Whoever wants the Soviet Union back has no brain. Whoever doesn’t miss it has no heart.” - Putin
That same year the same Yakovlev explained on television that the decree rehabilitating all those who had been persecuted since 1917 was not at all a measure of clemency, as people in the Party were saying, but of repentance: “We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon. The goal of this decree is to rehabilitate us, who by remaining silent and looking away were accomplices to these crimes.” In short, there was a sudden consensus that for the last seventy years the country had been in the hands of a gang of criminals.
He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag; I suspend my judgment on the matter. But … I thought to myself, his romantic, dangerous life says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about everything that’s happened since the end of the second world war.
He walks home along Madison Avenue looking at the passers-by, above all the men, and judging them. Better than me? Worse? Most are better dressed: this is a rich part of town. A lot of them are taller. Some are more handsome. But he alone has the hard, determined look of someone who’s able to kill. And all of them, when they happen to make eye contact, look away in fright.
I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.
Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.
The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.
The hunger for land: that great hunger which for more than half a century was to shake Russia and to throw her into a fever, body and mind.
By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.
He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.
Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.
On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It’s the neighborhood of colleges and convents.
Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.
-Alan and Marilyn Bergman, 1968
I reached Rue d'Ulm. It was deserted. Though I kept telling myself that there was nothing unusual about that on a Sunday evening in this studious provincial neighborhood, I wondered whether I was still in Paris. In front of me, the dome of the Pantheon It frightened me to be there alone, at the foot of that funereal monument in the moonlight and I veered off into Rue Lhomond.
At that moment a phenomenon occurred for which I'm still trying to find an explanation.... Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain... falling on him so heavily, had dissolved him....He had vanished in that sudden way that I'd later notice in other people...which leaves you so puzzled...you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed.
If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?
Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.
Real wisdom is the ability to understand the incredible extent to which you bullshit yourself every single moment of every day.
The word dharma can be a kind of catchall word in Buddhism. Dharma sometimes means the Buddha’s teachings specifically. But here the meaning is much wider. It’s almost like saying “stuff.” Dharmas could be stuff you’re going through — studying for your midterms, getting a divorce, making an egg-salad sandwich. Or it could be the people and things that are going through whatever it is they’re going through. The phrase “all dharmas” means the whole universe.
