The Troika Quotes

“Nothing had been decided, but everything was solved. Nothing had been repaired, but everything was fixed. Nothing had been cured. Yet everything was healed.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“I didn’t want to read it, but it was my strict policy never to disagree with people. Bitter experience had taught me that the minute you contradict someone, you instantly get sucked into their asinine private world. By avoiding arguments I wound up not talking to anyone. I lived utterly alone in my own asinine private world. Terribly alone and constantly crowded by idiots—that was my life. Rats gnaw off their feet with less provocation.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“Some children, you see, don't need wars or famines or plagues to convince them that vegetables have the right idea about life. Some children are convinced from the start.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“Cheated of shivering and cramps. Cheated of pleas and tears. Nothing outside of me, just my brain winding up my spinal cord like a rubber band in a toy airplane. Struggling to squirm out of the rotten frozen core of that dark, that dark, that dark so cold, you could cut it with a knife, with a knife so sharp, it would cut off your thumb, and your thumb so numb, it wouldn't cut butter, and the butter so small that it sings in the eye of an icicle and slips through a needle, through a needle so thin, it would slide off your spoon, and the spoon so hot, it burns a hole in your tongue, and your tongue so wet that it sticks to a frosty parking meter, and there you are, there you are, there you are, stuck. On a city street in the dirty sleet, stuck by your tongue.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“What if it's all right that I'm mad? What if that's not my problem? What if my problem is that I don't let myself be mad? That I'm forever and always tearing chunks out of myself, trying to root out the madness.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“This place has a mind of its own. This place, this trap, this bedlam, this bardo state, this gnarled knot of nothing.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“Who made their deaths impossible? Who reversed every lethal decision? Who vetoed their suicides?”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“I wondered about the masterminds who were directing all the mayhem. Did they really hope to survive? Or was I missing the point? Did they intend, instead, to incinerate themselves and all of us with them? Like mummified pharaohs and their entombed slaves. Why do that? Maybe just to prove that they owned the world. After all, you don’t own something unless you can destroy it.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“If the sailor in his sling were to turn and look down on her, he'd know she was a whore by the tentacles.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“An angelfish priestess in anemone drag sat on a post and wished that she were a conch man.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika

“Iron turns red when it corrodes, and copper turns green. Meat turns to maggots, and thoughts turn to speech.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika