Europe Central Quotes

“Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles…”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made…
For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“That was how I learned that no is stronger than yes. (Shostakovich already knew that.) It takes two yesses for I to become we, but only one no for we to break apart, no matter what the other party wishes.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them. Imagine,”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“All that's happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there's only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best in an airless room—correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots—the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Before [Hitler] slammed the door behind him, he needed there to be nothing left, not even the door itself.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness of a frozen canal.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Plato says that as one learns to love, the image of any specific beloved can be left behind for knowledge of the Good.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“I've come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it's not people's art!”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“At least I had one thing going for me: I was a realist.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“23 He dreamed that a bomb was singing to him. From far away, the bomb was coming to marry him. The bomb was his destiny, falling on him, screaming.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities. Just”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“I’ve never shot a civilian except when under orders.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“The times are new, but the informers are old.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“So even that doesn’t make you happy? What about your Seventh Symphony? At least it rallied people. Once you told me how alive you felt then; you said you gave it your all—
Didn’t you learn in school, he demanded in a hateful voice, that Ivan the Terrible, having coaxed his architect into, so to speak, putting the very best of himself into building Polrovsky Cathedral, afterwards put out his eyes? Anyway, things are so much easier in our century. LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL!”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Well let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“The majority of my symphonies are tombstones."

--Dmitry Shostakovich”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“... Ernst Paulus acató por fin el deseo de nuestro Führer y se reventó la tapa de los sesos en una lluvia gris y carmesí. Lo último que vio, o creyó ver, fue un ejército de esqueletos blancos en aquel día negro.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Volamos alto, bien, pero no sabemos apagar los rayos X que atraviesan la tierra para iluminar los esqueletos destrozados y torturados; cerramos los ojos, pero no podemos dejar de ver a través de los párpados.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“Está en el centro del mundo, compréndase. El centro del mundo es Leningrado, que es Stalingrado, que es Auschwitz. Todos los lugares llevan allí. De ahí el horror del 'Opus 110', tan íntimo como el limo de la garganta de la música, las cuerdas que gotean amargura y odio.”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“La vida es una prisión de tránsito. La luz del sol entre dos oscuridades no tiene nada de luz de sol; es la propia Europa Central...”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

“...each bullet not a moment but a moment's end...”
― William T. Vollmann, Europe Central