coinywords

[coinywords]

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

-- Lighthousekeeping

Jeanette Winterson

[coinywords]

Unbelongers Syndrome

No time belongs to you, no place is your own. What you are looking for is not looking for you, that which you are dreaming about is not dreaming about you. You know that something was yours in a different place and in a different time, that's why you're always crisscrossing past rooms and days. But if you are in the right place, the time is different. And if you are in the right time, the place is different.

incurable.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

I sit in a library, the library of the world.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future. What would the parable of Lot's wife sound like in this case? We walk forward and enter the endless Elysian fields. I walk forward and become past.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

The great leaving is upon you. They leave you one by one, all the bodies you have been. They dismiss themselves and take their leave.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

Memory holds you, freezes you within the fixed outlines of a single, solitary person whom you cannot leave. Oblivion comes to liberate you. Features lose their sharpness and definitiveness, vagueness blurs the shape. If I don't clearly remember who exactly I am, I could be anyone, even myself, even myself as a child.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

It's well known that our inept homegrown police of all eras have always shown unerring taste in poets and writers -- they always manage to kill the most talented and leave the most mediocre.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

A referendum on the past.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

People suffering from this not only forget what was, but they are also completely incapable of making plans, even for the near future. In fact, the first thing that goes in memory loss is the very concept of the future.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

Europe, which had thought that after several serious lapses in reason in the twentieth century it had developed full resistance to certain obsessions, particular types of national madness, and so on, was actually among the first to capitulate.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

Does the past disintegrate, or does it remain practically unchanged like plastic bags, slowly and deeply poisoning everything around itself? Shouldn't there be factories for recycling the past somewhere? Can you make anything else out of past besides past? Could it be recycled in reverse into some kind of future, albeit secondhand?

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn't put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains. Where do all those heaps of personal past go? Does someone buy them, collect them, throw them away? Or does it drift like an old newspaper, blown by the wind along the street? Where do all those familiar and unfinished stories go, those severed connections that still bleed, all those dumped lovers; "dumped" -- this word isn't a coincidence, a garbage word.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

If I'm not in his memory, do I exist at all? --Time Shelter Georgi Gospodinov Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

And how much past can a person bear? --Time Shelter Georgi Gospodinov Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

The real life of the world and humanity can be written in several afternoons, in the light of several afternoons, which are the afternoons of the world.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

[coinywords]

There is no time machine except the human being.

--Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel