A Minor Apocalypse
Tadeusz Konwicki
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We are only bits of protein in a cruel universe of silica and fire.”
“I had met a girl by chance that I might just as well not have met. A girl with red hair supposedly inherited from her grandfather, a plump girl with fair skin, broad lips, one eye light green and the other blue-violet, a girl who sometimes went wall-eyed and weighed around fifty-eight kilograms. Fifty-eight kilograms of water and lime, phosphorus, iron, as well as traces of other chemicals. Fifty-eight kilograms of water and a few pinches of the elements from her fellow countryman Mendeleev's table. Ten buckets of water brought to life by the great force of evolution or by our provincial God.”
“But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was all banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes. That the universe was filled to its edges with groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos.”
“Dreams are debris from bad day. Dreams are poems by bad poets that never got written.”
“Yes, I am confusing literature with life. I'm declaring my own ordinary life to be a work of literature.”
“The worse things are, the more they play philosopher. The more obvious the nonsense, the profounder their thoughts. The more lawlessness there is, the more laws. The more widespread the chaos, the more insistent their love of symmetry.”
“The world can't die. Many generations have thought the world was dying. But it was only their world which was dying.”
“She smelled like water that had been warmed by the sun, and she also had the sharp, enticing aroma of birch leaves.”
“Our contemporary poverty is as transparent as glass and as invisible as the air. Our poverty is kilometer-long lines, the constant elbowing, spiteful officials, trains late without reason, the water cut off by some disaster (...), the monotony of living without any hope whatsoever, the decaying historic cities, the provinces emptying the rivers poisoned. Our poverty is the grace of the totalitarian state by whose grace we live.”
“In today's ambiguous world, character means despotism, tyranny, absolute intolerance. At last it is time to admire a lack of character, inner weakness. Our epoch is that of noble doubts, blessed uncertainty, sacred hypersensitivity, divine wishy-washiness.”
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Book Keywords:
birch, weakness, life, literature, dreams, philosopher, uncertainty, dying, nonsense, woman, character, poverty, totalitarianism, world, laws
