All together, they have more death than we, but all together, we have more life than they.

Portraits

What I did not know when I was very young was that nothing can take the past away: the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Robinson Jeffers

There is something within us knows our fates from the first, our ends from the very fountain; and we in our nights may overhear its knowledge by accident, all to no purpose.

St. Isaac the Syrian

If you cannot be merciful, at least speak as though you are a sinner. If you are not a peacemaker, at least do not be a troublemaker. If you cannot be assiduous, at least in your thought be like a sluggard. If you are not victorious, do not exalt yourself over the vanquished. If you cannot close the mouth of a man who disparages his companion, at least refrain from joining him in this.

The Grapes of Wrath

The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s a monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

The Baron in the Trees

This gesture of moving the branch as if waiting for another land to appear, this plunging of his gaze deeper and deeper into the undulating distance as if hoping never to see the horizon, but to succeed, perhaps, in making out some place, alas, far too far away — this was the first real sign of exile…

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

The Unnameable

[T]hat’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two…

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

The Martian Chronicles

What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing.”

Chapter 38, Dusk

But my whole clock's run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.

Chapter 114, The Gilder

Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.

Desperation

You said, ‘God is cruel’ the way a person who’s lived his whole life in Tahiti might say ‘Snow is cold.’ You know, but you don’t understand. Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?

Xрущев поднял туфлю и уже хотел ударить по кафедре но увидел засохшее говно на подметке. Наверно я где-то влез в говно по самую щиколотку догадался Хрущев. Но все-таки он шваркнул туфлей и погрозил, - мы вам покажем кузькину мать, капиталистические бляди!

Khrushchev raised his shoe and already wanted to hit on the Chair but saw dried shit on the sole. I have somewhere stepped into a shit up to the ankles, guessed Khrushchev. But still, he has hit the Chair with the shoe and exclaimed:- We'll show you Kuzkin's mother, capitalist sluts!

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Dosoevsky and Chernyshevsky

Commentators on the Notes and on the motif of the Crystal Palace tend to appropriate the Underground Man's virulent invective and, in this case at least, to take it at face value. Thus they pour endless scorn on Chernyshevsky for his lack of spiritual depth: how stupid and banal this man must have been. to think that mankind is rational, that social relations are perfectible; how delightful that the profound Dostoevsky put him in his place. As it happens, Dostoevsky did not share this complacent condescension. In fact, he was virtually the only figure in respectable Russia to speak out, both before and after Chernyshevsky's arrest, in defense of his intellect, his character, even his spirituality. Although he believed Chernyshevsky to be both metaphysically and politically wrong, he could see how his radicalism sprang from "an abundance of life." Those who derided Chernyshevsky "have only succeeded in displaying the depth of your cynicism," which "serves current material interests, often to the detriment of your fellow men." Dostoevsky insisted that "these outcasts at least try to do something; they delve in order to find a way out;. they err and thereby save others; but you" -so he admonished his conservative readers-"you can only grin in a melodramatic posture of unconcern."