The Measurements of Decay Quotes

“Yes, for there I was, outside of society, destitute, torn between transformations, between beast and god. What other paths could I have taken? No, it was worth corrupting myself slightly, if corruption it truly was, for any filth on my soul would be washed out and countered tenfold—all corruptions sanctified in the purity of the ideal at hand.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“Follow me now, dark-hearted and gray-souled, as I stride on into the mist. If all ends are sown into their beginnings, then there is no other storm but this one.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“But, of course, I had no proof for any of these enticing thoughts. Cursed proof! Cursed proof. Proof: flimsy, false, ethereal fugitive, hiding at the end of a regress that runs out the world itself. No need for proof.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“have spoken to you before about the ocean of consciousness. About its sublime immensity, about how terrifying it is to behold. It is the eyes, laden with an entire world trapped in a moment of perspective, which express the terrifying consciousness of the other. To suffer the infernal gaze of the other is to witness another consciousness recognizing you. Not the frozen eyes of the dead or the sheathed daggers of the dreaming, but the waking, attentive other. It is to have this terrific alien consciousness confront you and elude you with its mysteries; with its secret history, which it will not reveal to you; with its endlessness, which you shall never capture. Conversely, when you gaze into the mirror and look yourself in the eyes, you see nothing but a blank appearance. You feel nothing but the pacific and neutral zero of totality. You do not feel the same apprehension, the same sense of mystery or unpredictability. Everything behind those familiar eyes is already clarified. Your reflected gaze is, in fact, mute, because it signifies nothing except the very act constituting it. Yet the closest you will come to seeing the other— not merely her corpse, but her and her existence —is by looking her in the eyes. When you return her gaze, you are struck by the possibility of her history, of her present being like an immortal’s never-finished painting covered in centuries of layers. What would otherwise be just an animated object in the world, no different to the wind or an earthquake, instead presents itself, like you as you know yourself, as an embodied soul. An immaterial subject, somehow present in the flesh. And what is love except the ceaseless attempt at capturing this subjectivity of the other without simultaneously compromising her autonomy? This autonomy, which she requires in order to return your love and therefore complete it. It envelops the patience of long marriage; the unity of welded lives, tastes, preferences, and ambitions. I looked at Sophia; I looked in her eyes. I looked at her and I loved her; I looked at her and I loved; I tried to look at her and I tried to love her.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“You know, I’ve heard my parents, throughout most of time, begging and crying about freedom. It’s pathetic. Asking for freedom is admitting that you don’t have any. And if you complain about not having it, then you’re shouting, ‘I will never be free,’ to the world. Even if you’re tied up and thrown into a dark room, you’re still free.” He paused for a short while to consider what she had said, reclining somewhat and staring at her face, which looked as though it were lit by a flashlight below. “No, I don’t understand. What you’re saying doesn’t make sense, not about any freedom worth caring about. Freedom is more than a choice between drowning and immolation. More than some cogs turning behind my mind.” “That’s a very silly way to think about it,” Sielle said. Enveloped in shadows, she inspired a chill down his spine. As if she were, in that moment, the avatar of some cosmic Pythia. “Using words like ‘more free’ and ‘less free.’ The measurements of something are not that something. And you can’t even measure how free someone is because everyone is always equally free, at all times, in all situations. There will always be different and infinite and better or worse options to choose from. The choice between water or soda, between this memory to recall or that, between extinguishing a star or not. Each requires the same freedom, not more or less. And if I thought the way you did, I’d say all those choices make me unfree, since I am forced to choose.” “So I’m free just for existing?” he asked. “Yes, in a way. All castles are made out of the playground’s sand. The only real castles are the monarchs who built them. You are free for existing with me.” He stayed silent and stared again beyond her dimmed face, which was becoming slightly damp with sweat.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“What precious sympathy accompanies their beginnings is drained by their systems; they are stripped of it, seduced out of it.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“And without the pitfalls of unrehearsed language, they organized in circles and triangles and squares and watched each other with blank, intense knowing, and there, having shed the horrors of words and meaning, having annihilated beauty, they escaped the savage and the civil man both.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“Yes, how terrible and worrisome when those externals became like organs, unfastened by bones or flesh to their hosts. Victims, all of us, to a life eroded by digital rain, pickaxed apart by bits and digits, with the small death of ring after ring ghosting through the cracks—each one a momentary, thin spike slid into the ego, bruising it, whispering, “You’re nothing” into it, compounding fractures in it, year after year, until the result was a paranoid beast unable to disconnect its mind from its pocket as it bulged with a poisoned treasure.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“There was a family there, too: a man and a woman expecting a child. Like most couples, they had first seen each other in a metempsy; that is, the interprocrustic network had mathematically determined their optimal compatibility and arranged for them to meet and fall in love by way of subliminal or explicit suggestions. Mostly, they showed up as love interests in each other’s metempsies a year before actually meeting, and were therefore conditioned into love at first sight. This particular couple, however, had decided within six months that they hated each other, and that whatever system had brought them together was therefore evil. Though they themselves could not adopt a monastic life free of metempsies like their neighbor, they wanted better for their child. They had thus resolved to have their child in the Bilge, in order to prevent it from being procrusted. A number of people had had this same idea over the years, and since such ideas were lethal to a fetus, it usually resulted in a stillbirth.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“It had begun not long after he had learned that she had no procrustus. Tikan, who hardly knew Sielle or her history, and whose sleeves were ever streaked with his heart’s blood, had started taking her as a blank canvas on which to project his own idea of her. And this idea was, insidiously, an abstraction he made out of her. To him, she was becoming the living symbol of his cause. Despite her flesh and her mind and words—rather, due to these—he began seeing her as a mere ideal of humanity, a fleshless world-soul containing in her the essences of each living person. A spirited, thinking person in a world dispirited and mindless. The torch-bearer and the posterity. The reason, the final cause. In her he saw some image of survival in the ideal unity of freedom. And in some sense, as the moment lingered, it was as if he were aiming his gaze through her, beyond her, and not quite at her.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“Where they had acquired these objects in their happy captivity, she could not tell. Though their expressions were, for the most part, still mute, she could yet discern a difference in their fixed stares, most obvious in the children. It was a subtle crease under the eyes, the mouths only slightly hanging agape. One of the children, whose gaze flickered more attentively than the others, was even holding a palm-sized, blackened rectangle of stiff paper, which retained a faded red mark at its corner and jagged gold at its top. Sielle could not restrain a smile from spreading across her face, for in each of those talismans over which they loomed, mystified, there remained the forms of metamorphosis and history and decay, and perhaps man was therefore an inescapably metaphysical animal yet.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“Madame Hugo had become insufferable. She had started with the peeking in at breakfast, and then moved on to skipping romps of faux-concern down the hallway at mid-day, speaking with trumpets in her throat and stumbling by my door with the grace of an elephant. In case it was not already clear, let me pronounce it: I loathed her. The violence I conjured up for her in that dark sanctum of mine was infinite, and the subject of her various fatalities and tortures came to almost—almost, but not quite—rival those intrusions which such thoughts of Sophia continued to make.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay