Victor Pelevin Quotes

What are they but the voice of history multiplied by millions of televisions?

There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth.

Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say that there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: 'There, that is Homo Zapiens.' HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house.

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

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.

The Eskimos have thirty words for describing different kinds of snow, and modern Russian has about the same number of expressions to describe giving a bribe to a state official.

You should know, my son, that that's what heroism is all about. No one's ever ready to be a hero - there's no way to prepare for it. Of course, you can practise till you're really good at running up to the gunport and have the knack of falling neatly across it on your chest - we teach all of that. But you can't teach anyone the actual inner act of heroism, it can only be performed. The more you wanted to live before, the better for the act of heroic sacrifice.

[P]erhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to these burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light, creeping unhurriedly through the constellations, points created here out of steel, semiconductors, and electricity, and now flying through space. And every one of us, even the blue-faced alcoholic we had passed on the way here, huddling like a toad in a snowdrift, even Mitiok's brother, and of course Mitiok and I - we all had our own little embassy up there in the cold pure blueness.

I was surrounded on all sides by the indifferent torpidity of summer, somewhere there were dogs barking lazily, while the machine-gun barrel of the sun was strafing the earth in a continuous, never-ending burst of fire.

In itself a wall on which a panoramic view of a non-existent world is drawn does not change. But for a great deal of money you can buy a view from the window with a painted sun, a sky-blue bay and a calm evening. Unfortunately the author of this fragment will again be Ed - but even this is not important, because the very window the view is bought for is also only drawn in. Then perhaps the wall on which it is drawn is a drawing too? But drawn by whom and on what?
He raised his eyes to the wall of the toilet as though in hopes of an answer there. Traced on the tiles in red felt-tip pen were the jolly, rounded letters of a brief slogan: Trapped? Masturbate!

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.

After walking round the statue and admiring the firm, reliable backside of the Party's loudmouth, Tatarsky finally realized that depression had invaded his soul. There were two ways he could get rid of it - down a hundred grammes of vodka, or spend about a hundred dollars on buying something immediately (some time ago Tatarsky had realized with astonishment that the two actions evoked a similar state of light euphoria lasting for an hour to an hour and a half).

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.

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.

But since I realised that peace and freedom were unattainable on earth, my spirit aspired aloft, and everything that my chosen path required ceased to conflict with my conscience, because my conscience was calling me out into space, and was not much interested in what was happening on earth.

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

Where are they all going? What for? Do they never hear the rhythm of the wheels or see the bare plains outside the windows? They know everything there is to know about this life, but they still move on along the corridor, from the W.C. to their compartment, from the lobby to the restaurant, gradually transforming today into one more yesterday, and they think that a God exists who will reward them or punish them for it.

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 early childhood (as, perhaps, after death) a person extends in all directions at the same time, so we can say he still doesn't exist yet- the personality comes into being later, when an attachment to some particular direction appears.

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?

An inverted five-pointed star. The humans don't understand it correctly. They draw a goat's head into it with the horns at the top. They like to see the devil everywhere, except in the mirror and on TV.

I had a dreary, depressed feeling so deep in my soul that I was almost ready to believe I had one.

There's obviously some strange correspondence between the general outline of a life and that stream of petty events in which a person is constantly involved and regards as insignificant.

The author's opinions do not necessarily coincide with his point of view.

Any seed, that fell into Russian soil, does not give the fruit sower hoped for.