Flights Quotes
"En route people are forced to be together, physically, close to one another, as though the aim of travel were another traveler."
"The surface of these monads hides within it vast mysteries, not even remotely hinting at the dazzling richness of these marvelously and cunningly packed structures."
"What more could he have asked for? Seeing the world from above, its beautiful, peaceful order."
"The wondrous human machine with rational, streamlined shapes, often resolved with humor."
"Many children play, in any case, with imaginary friends."
"He studied medicine but rapidly got bored of it. He wasn’t interested in diseases, much less so in curing them."
"This was how he traveled daily to the cafeteria."
"He arranged his personal life neatly, unproblematically."
"He knew it wasn’t allowed, but he was operating on the sociobiological premise that the university was his natural hunting ground."
"What makes us most human is the possession of a unique and irreproducible story, that we take place over time and leave behind our traces."
"The faster painful events are erased from memory, the faster they will lose their power over us."
"The world will become better. As long as people don’t find out how awful and abominable man can be to fellow man, their innocence will be left intact."
"The painless selection process led him to the escalators, and then a long, broad hallway, where fluidity was hastened by a moving walkway."
"The impression was almost impossible to believe."
"The illusion that here the insides of a living body were opening up, that one was participating in its secret."
"It’s interesting that he, like you, started out by researching Ruysch’s work."
"The body’s great mechanism would simply stop working."
"All people are equal at birth. From our parents we inherit only animal life, and in this—we know well—there is not the slightest difference between king, prince, merchant, or peasant. There is no law in existence, divine or natural, that could counter that equality."
"I am no longer asking but imploring Your Majesty for the return to my family of my father’s body."
"I write to You, too, on behalf of the other stuffed human beings contained within that Cabinet of Natural Curiosities."
"I feel it is my duty to them as the daughter of Angel Soliman to perform this Christian deed of asking."
"Our sense of space results from our ability to move. Our sense of time, meanwhile, is due to being biological individuals undergoing distinct and changing states."
"Place as an aspect of space pauses time. It is the momentary detainment of our perception on a configuration of objects."
"Human time is divided into stages, as movement through space is broken up by place-pauses."
"Not a single episode is to be continued, you might say."
"Maps of the world, of this internal and that external world, had already been drawn up, and that order, once glimpsed, irradiated the mind, etching into it the primary—the fundamental—lines and planes."
"The body is something absolutely mysterious."
"What do I care about a proof from the outside, framed as a geometric argument? It provides merely a semblance of logical consequence and of an order pleasing to the mind."
"God is not a deceiver! If we use the powers of our intellect in the right way, we will ultimately attain truth, learn everything about God and about ourselves, we who are a piece of Him, like everything else."
"God, which is to say nature, is neither good nor bad; it’s an ill-used intellect that stains our emotions."
"All our knowledge of nature is in reality knowledge of God."
"What once formed a whole but was then broken down into parts is still powerfully connected, in an invisible way that is difficult to investigate."
"We can trust only physiology and theology. These are the two pillars of knowledge."
"Why am I in pain? Is it because—in essence the body and soul are part of something larger and something shared, states of the same substance, like water that can be both liquid and solid?"
"Are we perhaps condemned to wholeness, and every fragmentation, every quartering, will only be a pretense, will happen on the surface, underneath which, however, the plan remains intact, unalterable?"
"If the world, like a great glass orb, falls and shatters into a million pieces—doesn’t something great, powerful, and infinite remain a whole in this?"
"Today I can ask myself this question: What have I been looking for?"
"Heaven to her? What would she find in a heaven of anatomists? It’s dark and boring; they’re clustered around motionless, standing over open human bodies, just men in dark clothing that barely stands out from the gloom."
"The nocturnal brain is a Penelope unraveling the cloth of meaning diligently woven during the day."
"Night gives the world back its natural, original appearance, without sugar-coating it; day is a flight of fancy, light a slight exception, an oversight, a disruption of the order."
"Everything is hypothetical in hell. All that daytime heterogeneity of form, the presence of colors, shades, reveals itself to be utterly in vain."
"The world in fact is dark, almost black. Motionless and cold."
"Oh, how good it feels—how incredibly good—to become part of a crowd that gradually warms up."
"Annushka half closes her eyes and feels as though her hands are being held, as though from all sides she is being embraced affectionately and rocked by reassuringly kind hands."
"There’s something wrong with this paper, which must be falsified somehow—which must be fake. Every sentence she reads is unbearable and hurts."
"When God became man, the human body was forever sanctified, and all the world took on that form of one single individual man."
"Dear brothers, we give you the right to choose your death."
"He who rules the world has no power over movement and knows that our body in motion is holy, and only then can you escape him, once you’ve taken off."
"She’s surprised by all the safety rites; she hasn’t flown for quite a while."
"Memory starts to slowly open its holographic chasms, one day pulling out the next, easily, as though on a string, and from days to hours, minutes."
"Just multiply the population count by the number of teeth they’d have, then you’d know your chances."
"Imagine, if you can, constant pain and progressive paralysis that goes one step further every single day."
"History was always unkind to us—as soon as things started to go well, they’d always come crashing down again."
"I’ve only really got one thing going for me, which is that I’ve always been organized."
"Super-value meal: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Pork chops and cabbage, apple pie and beer for dessert."
"The world all sloshed together in a single sludge."
"In the meantime the rehearsals continued for Requiem, as well-placed friends of the deceased negotiated delicately with the parish priest."
"Then for a moment he stiffens, because what the hell would that mean?"
"But when he focuses it returns to him, that they walked down the path, that the dried-out bushes of herbs crackled beneath their shoes."
"And when you don’t remember it means it never happened."
"He slices through the plastic tape on a package of books and takes out the stack of them without even looking at them."
"This extended gray space, slightly creased, confuses him."
"They’re in the car and looking out in silence at those haunting landscapes."
"The pictures are boring. Their one merit is that they fix instants that would otherwise have vanished completely."
"He sees with terrible clarity that the road, so familiar to him, is suffused entirely with lurid signs."
"The internet is a fraud. It promises so much—that it will execute your every command, that it will find you what you’re looking for; execution, fulfillment, reward."
"But in essence that promise is a kind of bait, because you immediately fall into a trance, into hypnosis."
"What are you, Kunicki, looking for? What are you aiming at?"
"Suddenly he realizes: there are different kinds of looking."
"Children become people when they wriggle out of your arms and say 'no.'"
"His upper person wants calm and justice; his downward person is transgressive and ignores all principles."
"The third week of September is rainy and windy."
"The windshield wipers working as hard as they can to clear off the water from the windshield, baring for just a second at a time the world plunged in rain, the smeared world."
"The professor brought her a glass of wine, and when he handed it to her, she noticed how his totally outmoded woolen vest was coming apart at the seams."
"The professor’s plane would stagger, its wheels dipping down into a rut, maybe even running off the runway—so he would take off from the grass."
"She was amazed by this man, her own husband."
"Karen took a longer look at the redheaded, fair-skinned man in jeans that hung around his hips, who rubbed the several days’ worth of light-blond stubble on his face."
"Reject everything, do not look, shut your eyes and change your gaze, awaken another one that almost everyone has, but that few use."
"In today's day and age, you could do it in two weeks."
"Look around where you are once more is like looking at an image in which a million details conceal a hidden shape. Once you see it, you can never forget it’s there."
"No one had taught us to grow old, how we didn’t know what it would be like."
"When we were young, we thought of old age as an ailment that affected only other people."
"Most of all, we enjoyed all the cross-sections."
"We will simply write each other down, which is the safest form of communication and of transit."