Quotes from Georgi Gospodinov

was always on hand if needed. The strategic national stockpile of unhappiness. But now (for the first time) the moment

Uvijek je popodne kada se ne?ega sjetimo, ili je barem kod mene tako. Sve je svjetlost. Znam s fotografija da je popodnevna svjetlost najprikladnija za ekspoziciju. Popodnevna je stara svjetlost, umorna i spora. Pravi život svijeta i ?ovjeka može se opisati kroz nekoliko popodneva koja su poslijepodneva svijeta.

Sve pri?e koje su se dogodile nalik su jedna na drugu, svaka pri?a koja se nije dogodila, nije se dogodila na svoj na?in.

I can feel myself giving up over time. Getting used to it. Old age is getting used to things.

Childhood and youth are full of verbs. You can't sit still. Everything in you is growing, gushing forth, developing. Later the verbs are gradually replaced by the nouns of middle age. Kids, cars, work, family—the substantial things of the substantives. Growing old is an adjective. We enter into the adjectives of old age—slow, boundless, hazy, cold, or transparent like glass.

Lotte, I asked without beating around the bush, what decade would you choose—the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties? She fell silent for a moment and gave the best answer that can be given to such a question: I'd like to be twelve years old in each of them. That would be my answer, too.

When I write, I know who I am, but once I stop, I am no longer so sure.

Sometimes we don't stop to think how some historical event only appears to be more distant than it actually is. When I was born, the Second World War was a mere twenty-three years in the past, but it has always seemed like a completely different epoch to me.

At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. Tomorow was September 1

If someone asks me what I did last year, I can safely answer that I smoked.

There's only one true identity—to be a living creature among living creatures. To be ephemeral and to value the Other, because he is ephemeral as well.

Ancak ölüm kibrini uyand?rabiliyordu. Onu orada buradakilerden daha çok insan bekliyordu.

They often keep turning the handle of the grinder after the coffee is ground.

Happy countries are all alike; each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, as has been written.

Later he couldn't even remember who was the one who had come up with the life-saving (or so he thought then) idea of inventing shared memories, to make up a whole life together before and after their meeting. A pathetic attempt to take revenge on merciless chance that had brought them together, only to separate them.

Soon after that we would go our separate ways, grow cold, forget one another, the rebels would grow tame as teaching assistants in the universities, the sworn bachelors and party animals would be pushing baby carriages and zoning out in front of their TV, the hippies would get regular haircuts at the local barbershop.

Your grandmother had an icon, your mother had a little portrait of Lenin, and you have your TV.

Outside Bulgaria's borders people age more beautifully and more slowly, old age is more merciful elsewhere.

If no one remembers becomes the equivalent of If there is no God. If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted.

The history of the family can be described through the abandonment of several children. The history of the world, too.