BOOKS

"Even a forester doesn't know what happens in the forest at night. And the brain isn't just a forest. It's a mysterious jungle. And it's not necessarily ours."

“If we perceive the brain as matter, moved by information through time, then the very concept of consciousness changes and all questions disappear.”

"'Dark Times'… are not identical to the monstrosities of our age, which are marked by a terrifying novelty. Dark Times, on the contrary, are not only not new, they are by no means rare in history…"

"Netsuke is a small, sharp flash of precision. And therefore, it deserves an equally precise approach." 

“I’m at the door, I open it, it’s pitch dark, there’s no one there, maybe I’m imagining things, maybe it’s just the hot blood rushing in my ears, or mines from the battle, or maybe I’m dead…”

"That year there were locusts. They howled in the green trees like panthers, floundering in hundreds on the face of the river."

start rewinding: the house is taking out 
flame and grows like a candle
a man is assembled from a shell and broken bricks
the plane swallows rockets, we get up from the floor to have breakfast, 
without rolling and without shouting

This world, growing wild before our eyes,
We guarded our meekness and our anger.
Weighed on home scales,
what remains and what we failed to do.

«Он кричал, что имеет право убить нигера. Почему – не сказал, до того распалился и ополоумел, что говорить не мог толком».

"I wash my hands every day, Jojo. But the damn blood never comes off. I put my hands to my face and I can smell it under my skin." 

"I remember mostly summer because winter meant school, and we human beings block out memories of school because they are terrible."

"Musk quickly became bored at Queens. The university was wonderful, but he didn't have to work hard in class."

“From a submissive fool who does not grow up, who does not overcome himself, the Word will never emerge…”

Asya Volodina "Protagonist" - Moscow: AST, 2022 It's hard to say whether Asya Volodina's book is more of a university novel or an ancient Greek tragedy. The former is suggested by the setting (the action takes place in the Academy, the prototype

"Home for me isn't a country, a state, or a city—it's the plain, the hills, the land, the forests. To understand this, just get out of the car and look into the distance, at the river's curve."

Maria Stepanova "Focus" M.: New Publishing House, 2024 Maria Stepanova's new book can be classified as fiction, since it contains artistic invention and a plot, and as autofiction, since the heroine is quite recognizable

"With skillful surgery and professional care, some of these patients will return home... and become a burden to themselves and to society."

"You're always getting lost. When you live such a long, monotonous life, you're bound to get lost. You're bound to trip over something trivial." 

"I need to wash, air out the room, change my sheets, although all of this is pointless: it won't help at all. This is what will help: to leave, to disappear, to leave not a trace, not a shadow."

Anton Sekisov "Vaginov's Room" Moscow: Alpina non-fiction; Bookmate, 2023 If thrillers can be funny, then we have before us a stunningly funny thriller that seems to immediately embody all the jokes about madness and

"But how incredibly lucky I was! If I had reached the pass five minutes later, the passage between the glaciers would have already been blocked by cloud, and I wouldn't have even known it existed."

“Everything was calm—so supernaturally calm that the rare sounds grated on the ear.”

"Submission, elevated to the rank of virtue, is the essence and foundation of a dictatorial state that will destroy us all."

 "For the first few hours of the epidemic, television was silent or lying, as usual. No emergency broadcasts—only news of stability and peace." 

“To become a proletarian writer, one must not only be one by birth, but also master dialectics…”

"Chess is our cultural code, what unites us all, what keeps society, people, and country from falling apart, what makes us us."

"The ordinary reader is not just one who reads, but one who leads the life of a reader."

"At first, the arrest of the schoolchildren seemed like a big deal. Then the bridge thing... And then—nothing. Beetroot prices have gone up, have you heard?"

"The era of the unavenged was beginning. The flow of time raged like speech searching for meaning, and my mother could easily have been lost in this flow, falling victim to a dark god whose existence many suspected."

"Will he see the White Maiden if he turns around? A glimmer of light in her wide-open eyes, veiled in milk, two dots in the dense forest darkness."