Victor Pelevin

“I want to find my golden joy," I said.The baron laughed loudly. "Splendid," he said. "But what does that mean to you--your golden joy?""The golden joy," I replied, "is when a peculiar flight of free thought makes it possible to see the beauty of life. Am I making myself clear?”

“MonstradamusМама. Когда я слышу слово «дискурс», я хватаюсь за свой симулякр.”

“Romeo-y-CohibaЭто твой RR SUV.IsoldAПочему?Romeo-y-CohibaОн же с твоей стороны.IsoldAНо ведь в нем ты. Значит, он твой.Romeo-y-CohibaКак он может быть моим, если я его не вижу?IsoldAА как он может быть моим, если я даже не могу в него залезть?”

“Of course, you don't turn into a shit just because you buy a Mercedes-600. It's the other way round: the reason you can afford to buy a Mercedes-600 is that you turn into a shit.”

“IsoldA: The only way to be alone is to behave as though we are alone already.”

“I am closest of all to happiness—although I won’t attempt to define just what it is—when I turn away from the window and am aware, with the edge of my consciousness, that a moment ago I was not here, there was simply the world outside the window, and something beautiful and incomprehensible, something which there is absolutely no need to ‘comprehend,’ existed for a few seconds instead of the usual swarm of thoughts, of which one, like a locomotive, pulls all the others after it, absorbs them all and calls itself ‘I’.”

“Можно сказать, что наш мир населяют два вида наркоманов, которые принимают сильнейшие психотропы с очень разным действием. Они видят диаметрально противоположные галлюцинации, но должны проводить время рядом друг с другом. Поэтому за долгие века они не только научились совместно ловить принципиально разный кайф, но и выработали этикет, позволяющий им вести себя так, как если бы они действительно понимали друг друга, хотя одни и те же слова, как правило, значат для них разное.”

“The USSR, which they'd begun to renovate and improve atabout the time when Tatarsky decided to change his profession, improved somuch that it ceased to exist (if a state is capable of entering nirvana,that's what must have happened in this case)”

“How can non-existence get sick of itself?Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.”

“In order for him to believe sincerely in eternity, others had to share in this belief, because a belief that no one else shares is called schizophrenia.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”