Calligraphy Lesson Quotes

“If you are going to say something new, you need to feel the centuries of tradition inside you. If a button is pushed at some power plant, the light flickers in the city's windows. So, too, in literature, if a word is written, it reverberates in all the existing books, regardless of whether you've read them or not.”
― Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

“You know, the only important thing is that there was a person for whom you were the most important being in the world. Everything else is inconsequential.”
― Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

“The author is the interface between earth and sky. Between life and text. It is he who can lead people out of time and into forever.

…

Languages is a means of resurrection. … Words must be made living not only until the cock crows but so the they cannot die anymore. I have to suck dead time out of the word and blow living time in, mouth to mouth—and force it to breathe, like a drowning victim. I have to resurrect it to eternal life with our breath. I have to use words to create a reality where there is no death.

Death can be overcome only by the word and by love.”
― Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

“The stories told, the words, create their own reality. The details are important. Words create realities and decide destinies.

Unidentified writers, under four evangelical pseudonyms, wrote a book that made the world what it is today. Their words created the very reality in which we have been living for two thousand years; the words simply had to be worthy of faith. Had it not been for the detail about the baked fish he ate after going hungry after he died on the cross, and the finger stuck into the wound, the world would not be Christian and would not be awaiting resurrection. The word becomes the reality, a reality of which we ourselves are merely a part.”
― Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

“In the beginning there was love, not the word. The child has yet to be conceived, but the mother already loves him. And then, body inside body, love doesn't need words. After the birth, mother and child still love each other nonverbally. Only with words, when verbal barriers arise between people who love each other, does alienation begin.

Thus, language creates barriers. Once they lost their sacred nature, words turned into a means of misunderstanding. Words don't mean anything anymore. So you have to do something with these words to restore their original, Divine meaning.

Words are guards that keep out emotion and meaning, sentries at the boundary between people. Either you need to learn to grope your way toward understanding each other, or else be able to escape over the verbal barbed wire.

There is no road to understanding except through words.

Word corpses watch over us. The only way to get past them is to revive them. We have to breath new life into them, so that love can once again be called love.”
― Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

“A foreign country remains foreign until you find people near and dear to you there.”
― Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

“Having your loved ones near you is the only important thing, and everything else has little meaning.”
― Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

“To know which way to go, you need to turn around and see where you're coming from. What is genuinely new is always a development of the tradition. In order to understand the tradition, you need to discover the word's genetic code, seek out the living DNA spiral along which you can trace where all this came from. And if you do untwist that spiral, you will arrive at He Who loves and waits for us all. You simply need to put the words in the one and only order (which is unknown) that makes the chain of words lock on God, so that life can run down it. The writer must find the precise order that makes real blood course under the skin of words.”
― Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

“As the years go by, taking genuine delight in something becomes possible only when you can share that delight with somebody else.”
― Mikhail Shishkin, Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories