Dictionary of the Khazars Quotes

“When we read, it is not ours to absorb all that is written. Our thoughts are jealous and they constantly blank out the thoughts of others, for there is not room enough in us for two scents at one time.”
― Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words

“I dream in a language I do not understand when I'm awake.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“It is not I who mix the colors but your own vision,' he answered. 'I only place them next to one another on the wall in their natural state; it is the observer who mixes the colors in his own eye, like porridge. Therein lies the secret. The better the porridge, the better the painting, but you cannot make good porridge from bad buckwheat. Therefore, faith in seeing, listening, and reading is more important than faith in painting, singing, or writing.'

He took blue and red and placed them next to each other, painting the eyes of an angel. And I saw the angel's eyes turn violet.

'I work with something like a dictionary of colors,' Nikon added, 'and from it the observer composes sentences and books, in other words, images. You could do the same with writing. Why shouldn't someone create a dictionary of words that make up one book and let the reader himself assemble the words into a whole?”
― Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel

“And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Един от сигурните пътища в истинското бъдеще (защото има и лъжливи видове бъдеще) е да вървиш в посоката, в която расте твоят страх.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Один из верных путей в истинное будущее – это идти в том направлении, в котором растет твой страх”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in front of him. As he passed them to me, his thumb brushed mine and I trembled from the touch. I had the sensation that our past and our future were in our fingers and that they had touched. And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading those pages...”
― Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel

“He took blue and red and placed them next to each other, painting the eyes of an angel. And I saw the angel's eyes turn violet”
― Pavich Milorad, Dictionary of the Khazars

“A bird foraging for food in the swamps and marshes sinks rapidly if it doesn't move. It has to keep pulling its feet out of the mire to move on, regardless of whether it has caught something or not. And the same applies to us and to our love. We have to move on, we can't stay where we are, because we'll sink.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Each of us promenades his thought, like a monkey on a leash. When you read, you always have to such monkeys: your own and one belonging to someone else. Or, even worse, a monkey and a hyena. Now, consider what you will feed them. For a hyena does not eat the same things as a monkey...”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Time comes not from the ground but from the underground. Time belongs to Satan; he carries it like a skein in the pocket of the devil, unravels it when his mysterious economies do dictate, and it should be wrested away from him. For, if one can ask and receive eternity from God, then we can take the opposite of eternity --time-- only from Satan...”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Sometimes bygone springs, full of warmth and scents, blossom yet again inside us. And we carry them through the winter, protecting them with our chests. Then, one day, those bygone springs begin protecting our chests from the frost when we find ourselves on the other side of the window, where winter is not just a picture. It is now the ninth winter that I have had such a spring inside me, and it is still keeping me warm. Imagine, in this winter, two such springs touching like the scents of two meadows. That is what we need instead of overcoats. . .”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars - Androgynous Edition

“When we read, it is not ours to absorb all that is written. Our thoughts are jealous and they constantly black out the thoughts of others, for there is not room enough in us for two scents at on time.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars - Androgynous Edition

“Always remember - you work because you don't know how to live. If you knew how to live, you would not work, and science wouldn't exist for you. But everybody taught us only how to work, not how to live. I don't know how to live either.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Knowledge is a perishable commodity; it can turn sour in a second. Like the future.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“The truth is transparent and goes unnoticed, whereas lies are opaque and let in neither light nor gaze. There is a third version, where the two mix, and this is the most customary. With one eye we see through the truth, and that gaze is lost forever in infinity; with the other eye we do not see even an inch through the lies, and that gaze can penetrate no further, but remains on earth and ours; and so we push through life sideways. Hence, the truth cannot be understood on its own, like a lie, but only by comparing it with lies, by comparing the white space with the letters of our Book, because the white spaces in The Khazar Dictionary mark the translucent places of the divine truth and name (Adam Cadmon), and the black letters between the white spaces are where our eyes cannot penetrate beyond the surface.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“He was creating the first letters of the Slavonic alphabet. He started with rounded letters, but the Slavonic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly language in them like a bird.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“- Поступки в человеческой жизни похожи на еду, а мысли и чувства - на приправы. Плохо придется тому, кто посолит черешню или уксусом польет пирожное...”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“It is not I who mix the colors but your own vision,' he answered. 'I only place them next to one another on the wall in their natural state; it is the observer who mixes the colors in his own eye, like porridge. Therein lies the secret. The better the porridge, the better the painting, but you cannot make good porridge from bad buckwheat. Therefore, faith in seeing, listening, and reading is more important than faith in painting, singing, or writing.”
― Pavich Milorad, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Die schönsten und glücklichsten Stunden in meinem Leben waren mit so einer schrecklichen Anstrengung verbunden, daß ich mich noch immer an sie erinnere. Ich erinnere mich an sie, das heißt auch an dich, nicht wie an ein Glück, sondern wie an eine freudige Anstrengung die fast unerträglich war. Warum war es so erschöpfend schwer, glücklich zu sein? Das aber ist alles längst vorbei wie der Wind in den Weiden. Ich bin ruhig geworden, seit ich nicht mehr glücklich bin.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Bog o tebi nema pojma; on niti vidi tvoje namere, niti tvoje misli, ni tvoja dela. To što ti je anđeo došao u san i buncao, znači samo da nije imao gde da prenoći, a napolju je verovatno padala kiša. A što je kratko ostao, to je po svoj prilici jer mu je u tvome snu suviše smrdelo. Operi svoje snove drugi put...”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“He grew up and later lived with an insatiable wanderlust. He always carried a rug with him and used to say, "My home is where my rug is"; he spent the better part of his life among tribes so wild that, after shaking hands, he always had to count his fingers. Only illness provided some sort of island of peace in his life. As soon as he fell ill, he would forget every other language save his own.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Reading is really like trying to hit one tossed stone with another; the consonants are the stones, the vowels their velocity.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Masculine and feminine stories cannot have the same ending.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Here lies the reader who will never open this book. He is here forever dead.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words

“It has been said ever since that the Brankoviches of Erdély count in Tzintzar, lie in Walachian, are silent in Greek, sing hymns in Russian, are cleverest in Turkish and speak their mother tongue --Serbian-- only when they intend to kill.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“It was no easy task to tame the barbarians' language. One quick three-week-old autumn, the brothers were sitting in their cell, trying to write out the letters that men would later call Cyrillic. They were not getting anywhere. Fromm the cell you could clearly see half of October, and in it the silence was one hour's walk long and two hours' walk wide. Then Methodius called his brother's attention to four jugs standing on the window of their cell, but outside, on the other side of the bars. "If the doors were locked, how could I get to one of those jugs?" he asked. Constantine broke one of the jugs, then drew the fragments piece by piece through the bars and into the cell, where he reassembled the jug, bonding it with saliva and clay from the floor beneath his feet. This they now did with the Slavonic language: they broke it in pieces, drew it into their mouths through the bars of Cyril's letters, and bonded the fragments with their saliva and the Greek clay beneath the soles of their feet.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Знание - товар скоропортящийся, того и гляди заплесневеет. Так же как и будущее.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Я привыкла к своим мыслям, как к своим платьям. В талии они всегда одной и той
же ширины, и вижу я их повсюду, даже на перекрестках. И что хуже всего - из-за них уже и перекрестков не видно.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars

“Один из верных путей в истинное будущее (а есть ведь и ложное будущее) - это идти в том направлении, в котором растет твой страх.”
― Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars