We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin

I rushed to the house-office, handed over to the controller on duty my pink ticket and received a certificate permitting the use of the curtains.

Another way of saying 'orgy-porgy' time in Brave New World parlance :D

“Why do I sit here enduring this smile with such resignation and what is this all about? Why am I here? And why all these strange sensations, this irritating, repellent female, this strange game?”

To be precise, because she drinks booze and enjoys nicotine, while you live by the rules of geometrically exact parameters.

“Fortunately the antediluvian time of those Shakespeares and Dostoyevskis (or what were their names?) is past,”

Can you believe that a book written over 100 years ago references Dostoyevski and Shakespeare? I find that mind blowing, especially as I finished Crime and Punishment and The Merchant of Venice, respectively, recently,

A fragment of iron-ore probably feels the same joy of submission to precise, inevitable law, when it clings to a loadstone. The same joy is in a stone which thrown aloft, hesitates a little at the height of its flight and then rushes down to the ground. It is the same with a man when in his final convulsion he takes a last deep breath and dies.

Metaphors for being in love.

“Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One loves only the things one cannot conquer.”

“what if that yellow-eyed one, sitting there on that absurd dirty heap of leaves, is happier than I, in his life which cannot be calculated in figures!”

I sometimes look at my dogs with their simplistic no-possession lives and wonder if they have a better existence than me, Better, perhaps not. Happier, for sure.

Here I learned from personal experience that laughter is the most terrible of weapons; you can kill anything with laughter, even murder.