The Man Who Couldn't Die Quotes

“Once they’d sorted out the hundred ‘instructions,’ the population came to believe, as they did in God, that the Krugal campaign was handing out free money.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

“Now, watching Alexei Afanasievich through the keen diopters of her dozing trance, Nina Alexandrovna understood deep down that an unnatural death, be it murder or suicide, was all about physical objects. You couldn’t do away with yourself without a tool. Virtually anything could be used to kill someone, after which it remained here, as innocent as ever and undiminished. Meanwhile, the everyday objects in this room (muffled by dispassionate philosophical dust) contained very little death; their shapes were too smooth, their corners too wooden; their harmless dullness could drive anyone to despair.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

“Only Apofeozov, whose tie pin cost so much as to become an almost magical object, could represent the district in the Duma; Apofeozov was loved the way people could love an American president running in District 18.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

“The harder life got, the more pliantly Nina Alexandrovna responded to its random and weak smiles, which might not have meant anything like what she was seeing from her perspective. Even she guessed how easy it was to buy her with the mere sight of a baby in a stroller or, say, the scene of a friendly conversation, when two men who were utter strangers to Nina Alexandrovna, perfumed youth wearing expensive clothing made somewhere that had to be overseas, simply clapped each other on the shoulder—but she was willing to value herself more and more cheaply because she lacked even crumbs of kindness for her emotional moisture to soften into a warm pap. Now, too, looking at her son-in-law digging the soft, thick, whitened mass out of the bowl with increasing enthusiasm, Nina Alexandrovna believed he might find a good job soon and the family wouldn’t have to stretch itself so thin waiting for pension day.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

“Nor would Marina, hewing to purely Party principles, let her stepfather find out about the death of his drunkard of a nephew, who looked like a dead man long before his live-in lover, an alcoholic with a face like stomach contents, killed the poor guy with a classic Russian ax. … Nonetheless, she refused to confirm this disgraceful death as a fact. For her anxious mother, who wasn’t allowed to see the real news, either, but who somehow could tell something bad had happened, the crime story became a vodka poisoning—which was also partly the truth since, according to the autopsy report, at the moment her nephew, unsteady on his feet, was leveled by the ax, his organism was as sloshed as soup and he had barely a few weeks to live. Nonetheless, Marina had to take care to maintain this person’s pseudo-life. … She just couldn’t zero him out—and evidently her mother, taking from the mailbox the latest transfer sent by Marina, still asked herself why her now grown-up relative didn’t show his face or come visit even for the holidays that had always been sacred for him, dates for reestablishing his rights and for being with his people. Doubtless, her mother secretly suspected that brusque Marina had insulted her relative—which was also true because the deads’ resentment for the living always seeps through the night and comes out on the wallpaper, and also because Marina had stashed the body.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

“Alexei Afanasievich could now go only by betraying his wife with his death, which he had taken, like a woman, into his cold bed.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

“Later, when all the air in the new life had become like it can be in a room where the windows are broken out and all the familiar faces have strangely drained into themselves, like water into worn out sand, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly realized that now it was impossible, forbidden, and foolish to be happy for someone else.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

“Clever fellows who repudiated each other nearly to the point of refusing to believe in each other's existence, they turned out to be like the two reels of a tape recorder with the tape running between them and broadcasting a recorded text.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being

“Now traces of her former beauty had become more noticeable than the beauty itself had ever been.”
― Olga Slavnikova, The Man Who Couldn't Die: The Tale of an Authentic Human Being