Katya > Katya's Quotes

“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”
― Theodor Adorno

“Кидание понтов, бессмысленных и беспощадных - обычная российская болезнь,.. Это вызвано не пошлостью нашего национального характера, а сочетанием европейской утонченности и азиатского бесправия, в котором самая суть нашей жизни. Кидая понты, русский житель вовсе не хочет показать, что он лучше тех, перед кем выплясывает. Наоборот. Он кричит - «смотрите, я такой же как вы, я тоже достоин счастья, я не хочу, чтобы вы презирали меня за то, что жизнь была со мной так жестока!» Понять это по-настоящему может лишь сострадание”
― Pelevin Empire V

“The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.”
― Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

“....своя Фудзи, пусть маленькая и заблеванная, есть везде...”
― Victor Pelevin, Empire V

“I can't sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can't help it.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”
― James Joyce

“Фсе сделано изтово, кто смотрет. Потому что издругово это сделать нельзя.”
― Victor Pelevin

“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Прошлое - это локомотив, который тянет за собой будущее. Бывает, что это прошлое вдобавок чужое. Ты едешь спиной вперед и видишь только то, что уже исчезло.”
― Victor Pelevin, The Yellow Arrow

“Monstradamus
Мама. Когда я слышу слово «дискурс», я хватаюсь за свой симулякр.”
― Victor Pelevin, The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur

“Протест - это бесплатный гламур для бедных.”
― Victor Pelevin, Бэтман Аполло

“Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travelers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you'll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you'll turn into a fool yourself.”
― Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“To wake up one morning and feel that I was a last a grown-up person, emptied of resentment, vengeful thoughts and other wasteful childish emotions. To find myself, in other words, an adult.

Truman Capote”
― Truman Capote

“Who speaks of victory? To endure is all.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“Ум – это безумная обезьяна, несущаяся к пропасти. Причем мысль о том, что ум – это безумная обезьяна, несущаяся к пропасти, есть не что иное, как кокетливая попытка безумной обезьяны поправить прическу на пути к обрыву.”
― Виктор Пелевин

“Моя единственная свобода в том, чтобы видеть, какой из злых духов захватил и ведет мою душу. А еще есть свобода этого не видеть, вот и все «to be or not to be».”
― Виктор Пелевин, Т

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“There is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is the court.”
― Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

“Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal (...). There is a tendency (...) for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious-because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe-some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they're born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others-some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Что такое эта ваша разруха? Старуха с клюкой? Ведьма, которая выбила все стёкла, потушила все лампы? Да её вовсе и не существует. Что вы подразумеваете под этим словом? Это вот что: если я, вместо того, чтобы оперировать каждый вечер, начну у себя в квартире петь хором, у меня настанет разруха. Если я, входя в уборную, начну, извините за выражение, мочиться мимо унитаза и то же самое будут делать Зина и Дарья Петровна, в уборной начнется разруха. Следовательно, разруха не в клозетах, а в головах. Значит, когда эти баритоны кричат «бей разруху!» — Я смеюсь. Клянусь вам, мне смешно! Это означает, что каждый из них должен лупить себя по затылку! И вот, когда он вылупит из себя всякие галлюцинации и займётся чисткой сараев — прямым своим делом, — разруха исчезнет сама собой.”
― М. Булгаков

“The rule apparently is – once a social revolution takes place there’s
no need to stoke the boiler. But I ask you: why, when this whole business started, should everybody suddenly start clumping up and down the marble staircase in dirty galoshes and felt boots? Why must we now keep our galoshes under lock and key? And put a soldier on guard over them to prevent them from being stolen? Why has the carpet been removed from the front staircase? Did Marx forbid people to keep their staircases carpeted? Did Karl Marx say anywhere
that the front door of No. 2 Kalabukhov House in Prechistenka Street must be boarded up so that people have to go round and come in by the back door? What good does it do anybody? Why can’t the proletarians leave their galoshes downstairs instead of dirtying the staircase?’
‘But the proletarians don’t have any galoshes, Philip Philipovich,’ stammered the doctor.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog

“What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed. You may ask what good it does us. Let's put it this way — human beings possess the weapon of knowledge in order to make life bearable. For animals such things aren't necessary. Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest. That's all there is to it.”
― Yukio Mishima The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959).

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“Маруха сидела на кухне. Там играла щемяще красивая музыка – одно из новых православных чудес, звуковой аналог мироточащей иконы: песня, в которой через много десятилетий вдруг проступило не замеченное прежде именование Иисуса. Ее часто заводят в московских церквях, особенно в дни поста:

Небеса…
Назорей…
Голоса зову-ут меня…”
― Victor Pelevin, iPhuck 10