The Big Green Tent

Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul

... we live in a society of larvae--immature human beings, adolescents disguised as adults.

Maybe it was true that only beauty would save the world, or truth, or some other high-flown garbage; but fear was still more powerful than anything else. Fear destroyed everything: everything born of beauty, the tender shoots of all that was fine, wise, eternal...

He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.

Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence.

Țară de copii! Cultura blochează reacțiile naturale ale adulților, și nu ale copiilor. Când cultura lipsește, bocajul lipsește și el. Există un cult al tatălui și al supunerii și, în același timp, o agresivitate infantilă necontrolată.

I'm afraid, Ilya Isayevich, that you don't have the slightest idea what the function of the secret police is. Exhibits disappear from libraries, personal archives, from museums. They are stolen, sold, exchanged, sometimes consciously destroyed. But I can assure you, in the archives of the secret police nothing is ever lost. True, the number of people granted access to them is extremely limited. But, believe me, there is no place more reliable for safekeeping. Nothing every goes missing there! Moreover, it is the very place where historical truth is preserved.

for some reason this metamorphosis didn’t occur in all of his pupils, or even most of them, but rather in the minority. What was the essence of this process? The awakening of a moral sensibility? Yes, of course. But why did it happen in some, and not in others? Is there some kind of mysterious module of transition: a ritual, or rite? Or perhaps Homo sapiens, rational man, also undergoes a phenomenon similar to neoteny, which is observed in worms, insects, and amphibians—when the ability to reproduce appears not in mature specimens, but already in the larval stages? And then the immature organism spawns analogous larvae, which will in their turn never mature.

Life outside the bounds of literature was harsh and abusive, but books offered living thought, and feeling, and learning. It was impossible to bridge these two realms, and he retreated farther and farther into literature. Only the children he taught could make the nauseating reality outside of books bearable.