Andrus Kivirähk · 442 pages
Rating: (3.1K votes)
“You might almost think that the forest is itself to blame for the people leaving its midst, because it behaves like a conqueror, spreading out in the footsteps of its former master.”
― Andrus Kivirähk, quote from The Man Who Spoke Snakish
“Nu, jaren later, zie ik zelf hoe idioot verlegen ik was. Geen wonder dat verlegen wezens zoals wij uitsterven. Wij waren nog slechts schaduwen, die voor zonsondergang nog even lang werden om daarna helemaal te verdwijnen. Ik ben ook verdwenen. Niemand weet dat ik nog leef.”
― Andrus Kivirähk, quote from The Man Who Spoke Snakish
“Je mis plusieurs mois à ma remettre. Je n'avais tout simplement pas envie de guérir ; c'était si bon de rester dans cet état d'inconscience fébrile, sans penser, sans me souvenir. Les rêves venaient et s'en allaient, et lorsqu'il y avait en eux quelque chose de triste ou d'effrayant, presque aussitôt cela me sortait de l'esprit et s'effaçait devant de nouveaux songes. J'aimais garder les yeux fermés tandis que des visions multicolores sans nom ni forme précise me nageaient par la tête dans une brume étincelante, et c'était comme si elles m'avertissaient de ne pas m'éveiller.”
― Andrus Kivirähk, quote from The Man Who Spoke Snakish
“You're my dream and I plan to sleep forever.”
― Andrus Kivirähk, quote from The Man Who Spoke Snakish
“So great is the sea and so tiny are we.”
― Andrus Kivirähk, quote from The Man Who Spoke Snakish
“
Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: the refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can lick them, join them. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to loose hold of everything else.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
“This is the plot up to the moment when the writer leaves the woman still dolefully enmeshed in it, and, suitcase in hand, tiptoeing so as not to disturb her postcoital rest, he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility, a total lack of gravity, reliance at too many key points on unlikely coincidence, an absence of inner coherence, and not even the most tenuous evidence of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose. The story so far is frivolously plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted, with outlandish events so wildly careening around every corner that there is nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold and develop a perspective. As if the look-alike at the story's storm center isn't farfetched enough, there is the capricious loss of the Smilesburger check (there is the fortuitous appearance of the Smilesburger check; there is Louis B. Smilesburger himself, Borscht Belt deus ex machina), which sets the action on its unconvincing course and serves to reinforce the writer's sense that the story has been intentionally conceived as a prank, and a nasty prank at that, considering the struggles of Jewish existence that are said to be at issue by his antagonist.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Operation Shylock: A Confession
“about an hour and a half I’m going to have the president call him. The president is going to tell Jack that he wants you to look through all of the logs the Secret Service has on Ross and Alexander going back to this past September. I especially want you to look at the two weeks prior to the attack. I want to know if they had any foreign visitors, and I want you to keep an eye out for any mention of Stu Garret.”
― Vince Flynn, quote from Act of Treason
“She had filled her days mourning that shadow life, and it had no more meaning than the chattering of monkeys. Instead, these last few weeks, she had seen what might have been had she not felt perpetually done out of something better.”
― Anna Quindlen, quote from Blessings
“يكي دوبار كارلا يكدفعه شروع كرده بود به حرف زدن و كار خيلي احمقانه اي كرده بود، فقط براي آنكه فضا را عوض كند. از آن كارهايي كه كه وقتي سواركارهاي دست و پاچلفتي و وحشتزده تازه كار احساس حقارت مي كردند، از او سر مي زد.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Runaway
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