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Buddha's Little Finger

by Victor Pelevin · 1996

Russian novelist Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and mind-bending talent prompted Time magazine to proclaim him a "psychedelic… more

5 quotes ★ 4.26 (8,871) Fiction

Quotes from the Book

I was surrounded on all sides by the indifferent torpidity of summer, somewhere there were dogs barking lazily, while the machine-gun barrel of the sun was strafing the earth in a continuous, never-ending burst of fire.
6
Gazing at the faces of the horses and the people, at this boundless stream of life raised up by the power of my will and now hurtling into nowhere across the sunset-crimson steppe, I often think: where am I in this flux? GHENGIS KHAN
3
If one tries to run away from other people, one involuntarily ends up actually following in their path throughout the course of one’s life. Running away does not require knowing where one is running to, only what one is running from. Which means that one constantly has to carry before one’s eyes a vision of one’s own prison.
2
Zresztą nigdy nie rozumiałem w pełni swoich wierszy, domyślając się od dawna, że autorstwo to rzecz wątpliwa, a wszystko, czego wymaga się od tego, kto wziął pióro do ręki i pochylił się nad kartką papieru, to ustawić mnóstwo rozsianych w duszy dziurek od klucza w jedną linię, tak żeby nagle padł przez nie na papier promień słońca.
-¿Estás familiarizado con el concepto 'visualización'? -preguntó el barón-. ¿Cuando tantos creyentes le rezan al mismo dios que este se hace realidad en la forma exacta en que lo han imaginado? -Sí, estoy familiarizado. -Lo mismo sirve para todo lo demás. El mundo en que vivimos no es más que una simple visualización colectiva que nos enseñan a realizar en nuestra más tierna infancia. De hecho, es lo único que las generaciones se legan unas a otras.

About Victor Pelevin

We have collected 42 quotes from 4 books by Victor Pelevin on BookQuoters.

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About the book

Russian novelist Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and mind-bending talent prompted Time magazine to proclaim him a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber-age." In his third novel, Buddha's Little Finger , Pelevin has created an intellectually dazzling tale about identity and Russian history, as well as a spectacular elaboration of Buddhist philosophy. Moving between events of the Russian Civil War of 1919 and the thoughts of a man incarcerated in a contemporary Moscow psychiatric hospital, Buddha's Little Finger is a work of demonic absurdism by a writer who continues to delight and astonish.

Book details

First published
1996
Genre
Fiction
Goodreads rating
4.26 (9k ratings)

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