Moscow Diary Quotes

“You have to have approached a place from all four cardinal points if you want to take it in, and what’s more, you also have to have left it from all these points. Otherwise it will quite unexpectedly cross your path three or four times before you are prepared to discover it. One stage further, and you seek it out, you orient your-self by it. The same thing with houses. It is only after having crept along a series of them in search of a very specific one that you come to learn what they contain. From the arches of gates, on the frames of house doors, in letters of varying size, black, blue, yellow, red, in the shape of arrows or in the image of boots or freshly-ironed laundry or a word stoop or a stairway’s solid landing, the life leaps out at you, combative, determined, mute. You have to have traveled the streets by streetcar to realize how this running battle con-tinues up along the various stories and finally reaches its decisive pitch on the roofs.”
― Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary

“Можно ли еще у немногих прилавков с изображениями святых тайком приобрести те странные иконы, продажа которых была запрещена еще при царизме, не знаю. Я видел Богоматерь, с тремя руками. Она была полуобнажена. Из пупка растет сформировавшаяся, крепкая рука. Справа и слева две другие, распростерты в благословении. Три руки считаются символом Троицы.”
― Вальтер Беньямин, Moscow Diary