Time Shelter Quotes
"When else would a bored creator set about building a world and finding himself some company?"
"On or around December 1910, human character changed."
"For the homeless, Gaustine felt love and dread, those were the precise words, and always in that combination."
"A short article appeared in a small newspaper, one of those news items that was read by five people, four of whom instantly forgot it."
"My objections to that system were not so much political as aesthetic."
"I wonder whether that was going through his head as he stood in that Sofia night before the empty shop window with the bare hanging bulb."
"Zurich is a good city for growing old. And for dying as well."
"The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined."
"Happened stories are all alike, every unhappened story is unhappened in its own way."
"If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted. God will turn out to be nothing but a huge memory."
"The most terrible thing about hide-and-seek is realizing that no one is looking for you anymore."
"The world was recovering from the war and wanted to live."
"Memory loss was affecting ever younger people."
"Open your mouth and let’s take a look, aha, now I recognize you."
"Surely it’s possible to create an archaeology of teeth."
"In the attic was left for the 1980s and ’90s—they would be needed someday."
"Every morning I look through the newly arrived newspapers and magazines."
"Suddenly the ads have become the true news about that time."
"Incidentally, in 1939, the use of radios sharply increased."
"That’s how the 1970s were to some extent, marble and old men."
"The world was closed and those city names were the only proof that somewhere out there beyond the fading, the crackling, the deliberate jamming, those cities existed."
"People who had been silent for so many years in a given language, she spoke very well."
"We survived thanks to this pot, Hilde said, you could even boil stones in it."
"A sense of a vanished world that had had a good time, driven a Pontiac, worn white slacks and a wide-brimmed hat, drunk Cinzano, strolled around Saint-Tropez."
"Every nation, just like every person, has its moments of madness."
"Difficulty breathing is one of the most commonly mentioned symptoms."
"Beyond the individual diagnoses a tendency toward collective fear and rejection of the future, futurophobia, has been observed."
"Europe was no longer the center of the world and its people were intelligent enough to realize this."
"The truth is, there is no way I can call any one of those erstwhile angels, not even Emma, especially not her."
"Isn’t this draft pulling toward the past in the end an attempt to reach that sound place, no matter how far back it might be, where things are still whole?"
"That’s how everyone lived in that wondrously simmering time."
"I wonder whatever happened to that guy, I think as I curse inwardly."
"My heart says, Giddyap, legs, but they’ll hear none of it."
"People believe that no matter what happens, the inviolable consolation of nature will remain."
"The past can only be played by four hands, at the very least."
"In apathetic and lazy nations, neither kitsch nor evil can win out for long."
"Happy countries are all alike; each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way."
"Happiness, you say? Happiness is as perishable as milk left out in the sun."
"A person is not built to live in the prison of one body and one time."
"In the end, in the referendum people chose the years when they were young."
"Pandora’s box with its evils of the past had already been opened."
"I need to go to 1939, I’ll write when I get there."
"The world had become a chaotic open-air clinic of the past."
"God is not dead. God has forgotten. God has dementia."
"What is going through the head of a God who holds all the stories in the world?"
"I don’t recall when exactly he started to become more real than me."
"The waters of the Lethe aren’t what they used to be."
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures in the present."
"Have we spent it yet, my dear friends, the paycheck of the future?"
"What should I do with these clinics and villages of the past?"
"The world was returning to its original state of chaos."
"I remember, so as to keep the past in the past."
"But what if time has already stopped? How will we know?"
"I must be three years old. Just as tall as the roses in the garden."