Quotes from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travelers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you'll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you'll turn into a fool yourself.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that's true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don't change.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“I had a dreary, depressed feeling so deep in my soul that I was almost ready to believe I had one.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“But the most terrible thing was that the shame didn't simply sear my heart, it also mingled into a single whole with the pleasure I was getting from what was going on.

It was something quite unimaginable - truly beyond good and evil. It was then that I finally understood the fatal abysses trodden by De Sade and Sacher-Masoch, who I had always thought absurdly pompous. No, they weren't absurd at all - they simply hadn't been able to find the right words to convey the true nature of their nightmares. And I knew why - there were no such words in any human language.

'Stop,' I whispered through my tears.

But in heart I didn't know what I wanted - for him to stop or to carry on.

I couldn't hold back any longer and I started crying. But they were tears of pleasure, a monstrous, shameful pleasure that was too enthralling to be abandoned voluntarily.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“А если в клиенте проснется самое высокое, мы потеряем клиента, это знает любой маркетолог.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“красавицы одной эпохи часто вызывают у другой недоумение.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“Because from the first line I can tell how many hours the mule was carrying it up his ass on the way from Colombo to Minsk. And that's nothing, I can know how many times that ass of his was...”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“— Когда они займутся тем, в чем они понимают, они перестанут рассуждать о том, чего не понимают.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“Считается, если бросить палку собаке, она будет глядеть на эту палку. А если бросить палку льву, то он будет, не отрываясь, смотреть на кидающего. Это формальная фраза, которую говорили во время диспутов в древнем Китае, если собеседник начинал цепляться за слова и переставал видеть главное.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“Собака смотрит на палку, а лев — на того, кто ее кинул. Кстати, когда это понимаешь, становится намного легче читать нашу прессу…”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“We're taking a ride down the Kashirksy Highway”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“Democracy, liberalism--those are just words on a signpost, she was right about that. But the reality is more like the microflora in your guts. In the West, all your microbes balance each other out, it's taken centuries for you to reach that stage. They all quietly get on with generating hydrogen sulphide and keep their mouths shut. Everything's fine-tuned, like a watch, the total balance and self-regulation of the digestive system, and above it--the corporate media, moistening it all with fresh saliva every day. That kind of organism is called the open society--why the hell should it close down, it can close down anyone else it wants with a couple of air strikes. The question is, how do you arrive at this condition? What they taught us to do was to swallow salmonella with no antibodies to fight it, or other microbes to keep it in check at all. Not surprisingly we developed such a bad case of diarrhea that three hundred billion bucks had drained out before we even began to understand what was going on.”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

About the author

Popular quotes

“Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.”
― Samuel Richardson, quote from Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady

“A typical weeknight when he was home like this:

1. Sit down and try to do homework.
2. Get interrupted by Jeffrey: “Please play with me!”
3. Ignore brother, try to do homework.
4. Get interrupted by Jeffrey: “Come ON, Steven! I’m BORED!”
5. Beg Jeffrey for five minutes of peace.
6. Get begged for five minutes of play: “Steven, you never, ever play with me—ever!”
7. Move entire homework operations center to different room.
8. Repeat steps #1-7 as directed by small drugged maniac.”
― Jordan Sonnenblick, quote from Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie

“In the end everything will be okay. But hurdles have to be jumped through first.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from Return to Paradise

“Hierarchy was like breathing: the only time you thought about it was when something went wrong.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, quote from Trial by Fire

“The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.”
― Justin Cronin, quote from The Twelve

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.