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“In short, you had that particular ability which I never had: the ability to be alive.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Why frighten little children with the dark when one can quiet them with it and lead them into dreams?”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Hiding my half existence behind the opaque walls of my skull, concealing it like a shameful disease, I did not consider the simple fact that the same thing could be occurring under other skullcaps, in other locked rooms.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“A dingily bilious sun was seeping through a tent of black clouds. Passersby, spitefully elbowing elbows, were rushing along the pavement. People thronging the doorways of shops tried to pummel their way through and stuck fast, their faces flushed with spite and fury, their teeth bared.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Muscovites see clearly but write muddily; the eye grasps but the fingers splay.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“People are ignorant of what any street clock knows. Why? Because the crack that cleaves existence also swallows their existence-reflecting consciousnesses. Thrown back into existence, the poor souls don't suspect that a moment ago they didn't exist - and only isolated things and persons, swallowed by the crack never to return to this world, arouse a certain fear and foreboding.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“the outside world is just a bad habit of the so-called nervous system.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“...as I was sifting through a heap of old and new "identity cards," I noticed that something was missing: my identity.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“A dingily bilious sun was seeping through a tent of black clouds.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“At the time I...loved someone. Now I wouldn't know how.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Here, in the city, associations tend to be strangely uniform: An association by similarity (especially an inner, essential similarity) is rare and almost unachievable. Here the barbershops all trim moustaches the same way, dress shops all button women into much the same styles, bookshop windows display all the same book covers - all billed as THE LATEST THING! From nine to ten every morning four-fifths of the total number of eyes are hidden behind newssheets identical down to the last misprint. No, here in the city, if you make associations by similarity, you're bound to confuse everything (the familiar with the unfamiliar, today with yesterday), to grow melancholy, and to even go mad.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“But it's fair to say that the war's [WWI] dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. And if the war managed only to separate the living from the dead, then the new regime, arriving in its wake, would sooner or later pit them against each other as enemies.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“So I’m a corpse. So be it. But I too shall see the sun at the hour of my burial.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“... he divided the books into two piles.
"These went past. Those went through.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“A point in space may be found, they say, only by means of intersecting coordinates. But should those coordinates come apart, then... space is vast, while a point has no size at all. Evidently my coordinates had come apart, and to find me, a psychic point in infinity, turned out to be impossible”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“THE ECONOMIC barometer at Harvard University had consistently pointed to bad weather. But even its precise readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its own energies. Oil wells were running dry. Black, white, and brown coals were producing less and less power every year. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snowcaps melted by the perennial summer could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine generators would stop. The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun’s yellow whips, it whirled around like a dervish dancing his last delirious dance.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“THIS WHOLE story would have remained hidden under the starched cuff and sleeve of a jacket, if not for the Weekly Review. The Weekly Review came up with a questionnaire (Your favorite writer? Your average weekly earnings? Your goal in life?) and sent it out to all subscribers. Among the thousands of completed forms (the Review had a huge circulation), the sorters found one, Form No. 11111, which, wander as it would from sorter to sorter, could not be sorted: On Form No. 11111, opposite “Average Earnings,�� the respondent had written ��0,�� and opposite “Goal in Life,�� in clear round letters, “To bite my elbow.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“Релсовите сглаби отмерваха стакатото на пътя. Една фуражка, висяща с козирката надолу от куката на стената, се полюшваше насам-натам, сякаш се опитваше да изтърси мигренозна болка от сукнените си слепоочия." - "Глуха линия”
― Сигизмунд Кржижановски, Автобиография на един труп

“Wherever you look, everything is in a row: a seven-story pile abutting a three-windowed log hut hard by a fantastical L-shaped mansion; ten paces from its columns is an outdoor market; farther on, a polluted pissoir; farther still, the white light of a belfry's tent roof, fringed cupolas rising into the blue - and, towering over the tiny church, another enormous edifice gleaming with fresh paint. Moscow is a mishmash of utterly unrelated (logically and optically) building ensembles, of large and small houses crammed from cellar to eaves with utterly unrelated offices, apartments, people living apart, at odds, past one another, yet separated only by thin walls, often plywood that doesn't reach the ceiling. In Moscow people and their paraphernalia are close to each other not because they are close but because they are side by side, cheek by jowl.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse