“
You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else's.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she’d shout into it and no one would hear her. That’s Facebook.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
There are so many paths to contentment if you're open to self-delusion.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
I guess our lives are all dreams – as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The calcium in collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
A single whisper can be quite a disturbance when the rest of the audience is silent.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Endurance, I reminded myself, is the true measure of existence.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The problem with rejection is that it feels imposed even when it's earned.
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”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.
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”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
I have human friends, obviously. But everything's easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
History is the error we are forever correcting.” —Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno
”
”
Paul A. Offit (Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong)
“
[T]o some people ignorance is a sleeping mask they mistake for corrective lenses.
”
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Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer." [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]
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”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
This should be a librarian’s job, of course, but you can’t trust people who read that much.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
You have waited for me past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, past each of Saturn's rings. It's ridiculous, so stupid, I know, to cross the entire solar system just to hear you and Galina butcher Tchaikovsky. If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose and mouth that compose a sitter's face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Go to other countries. Not a typical backpacking tour. Planned tour
means you will hang with Americans on bikes and flirt with drunk
Germans and someone will steal your Levi’s in the hostel and a guy
from Poland will sock you in the face while bad techno plays
everywhere and you will learn nothing except that your face hurts and
not everyone showers. Get into other cultures and talk politics and
love. Meeting other people is the only way to know if you believe what
you believe cause it’s been handed to you, or if it really rings true
in your heart.
Getting lost should be seen as a sweet chance to be found.
Remember, you belong everywhere.
”
”
Derrick Brown
“
The television dramas we grew up on, stories of star-crossed lovers, stories of love overcoming all obstacles, well, they’re all fairy tales, obviously, like the television news; but the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Never forget the first three letters of confidence.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
We should all be so lucky to get from life a sunny-day swim in chemical waste.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
I never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life's madness: the
institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
You have to feel the mix and you have to feel the work and the sweet somehow which somebody is investing in that moment in the way that you can really feel the passion.
”
”
Tobias Thomas
“
There's nothing quite like the sight of two dozen half-naked octogenarians. We enter the stage of life as dolls and exit as gargoyles.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
What divine imagination could conjure something so imperfect as life?
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Behind the ticket counter stood a man as skinny as a soaked poodle. He sported a shirt of swatch-sized plaid and a blond ponytail that, unless destined for a chemotherapy patient, should have been immediately chopped off, buried in an unmarked grave, and never spoken of again. Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
To say he felt guilty would ascribe to him ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed. At least, that's what he told himself. Better to deny the existence of objective morality than to live in its shadow. Better to tell yourself that the world of right and wrong is not the world you belong to. In the bathroom mirror he saw the face of a man his seventeen-year-old self would have disdained with the vanity of someone yet unaware of the many means the world has to break him.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Kolya kissed her wide eyebrows, her neck, every square centimeter of her nose. The parts she mentally amputated were the ones he most adored. Beneath the sheets they were pale and naked and they pouched their hands in the warmth between their stomachs. They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can't trade atoms how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed. We're not gaseous no matter how we sit to cloud together inseparably. Nothing less would have satisfied Kolya, nothing less than obliterating himself in her was sufficient.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.
Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?
There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
”
”
Jonathan Franzen
“
In the flash there's no final thought, no final reflection, just the breath carried from her body on the back of the bullet.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are proud, we are so proud of them. We've given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what kept them alive.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
We were so awkward, morning pimples in the mirror, hair where we never wanted it, and we thought of the lung cancer X-ray that was the album art for Surfin' Safari, considered the ways a body betrays its soul, and wondered if growing up was its own kind of pathology. We fell in and out of love with fevered frequency. We constantly became people we would later regret having been.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories)
“
The central question was how to trick tourists into coming to Grozny voluntarily. For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
There were days when Earth's small glories were luminous enough to dim church icons to duller golds. Diving from the roof into fresh snow. Throwing dishes from the window after Mother's funeral. I have been blessed.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The past few months have been the most serene of his adult life. The megalopolis in his mind has quieted to a country road. He does his work, he eats his bread, and he sleeps with the knowledge that today hasn't added to the sum of human misery. For now at least it's peace of a kind he hadn't imagined himself worthy of receiving.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
There is no way to tell if we are the pioneers of a visionary new age, whisking humanity into the high vibrations of an interdimensional love party, or post-modern Don Quixotes attacking techno-industrial windmills with our flimsy, rolled-up yoga mats.
”
”
Jonathan Talat Phillips (The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic)
“
I’d never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life’s madness: The institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
He’s an excellent listener. Most cats are. Except Siameses, the chatty little bastards. I
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
You might question a belief that so readily betrays its believers.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Wealth announces itself with what's easy to break and impossible to clean. The chairs were all curvy works of art that turned sitting into yoga exercises.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
If God has a voice, it is ours.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
What an improbable thing it was to be alive on Earth.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
They were building a life of small kindnesses together. Some days it was extraordinary.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Our children forever changed our relationships with our mothers. Pity replaced the mild contempt with which we had previously regarded them, and we loved them as we never had before, as we could only love ourselves, because despite our best intentions we had become them.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
A mother comforts, a mother cleans. A mother gives when any reasonable person would deny. Life might affix any number of labels to Vera- Russian, pensioner, widow, daughter- but when she looked to her washed-out reflection in the bathroom mirror, she saw only Lydia's mother.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Vera had held this body when it was moments old, had washed, fed, clothed it, and on her best days she couldn't look at her daughter without swelling with self-regard for having given birth to someone so worthy of love. Now that body had grown beyond the jurisdiction of her protection. Though it was rarely deployed in Vera's emotional vocabulary, she could think of no better word than wonder to describe the startling closeness of just standing here beside her child. Forget Lydia's poor choices. Forget the demons Vera could only guess at. The very fact Lydia was alive gave her mother the faith to believe she had done this one thing right.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
But to some people ignorance is a sleeping mask they mistake for corrective lenses.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
... you need a soul the devil wants before you can begin bargaining with him.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
... the error in the lie that is the truth.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
this is the highest point in leningrad" he taps. "with the very best view."
"these are windowless rooms," I point out. "in a cellar."
"yet from here i see the kingdom of heaven
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
We have art in order not to die of the truth,” wrote Nietzsche
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
All I'm trying to say is don't trust someone who posts photots of himself playing with puppies and kittens online. Chance are, they're sociopaths.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Our spirit animals were all of the genus American Kingpin Tragically Slain in His Prime. Our parents learned English from the Beatles, but we learned from Biggie.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
And in the middle of the lake the woman I'd spoken with floated on her back, eyes closed, as if nothing in her many years had ever gone wrong.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Hipsterdom’s a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Those who can’t succeed, teach.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
I guess our lives are all dreams—as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
My Seryozha. My holy little fool. You've spent these last few years working so hard to become an asshole. Despite your best efforts, you're becoming a man instead. And I know you want to become so great an asshole that centuries from now people will speak of wiping their Sergeis. But you're not an asshole. You're my son. So when you want to disgrace yourself, remember, little one, that you are all of your father's pride.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Sometimes his expired faith in rational logic revives itself long enough to believe in points. ... but in the end he always ends up feeling like an asshole for thinking any of the pain he either inflicts or endures has meaning beyond the senseless fact of its existence.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The interrogation has succeeded; I am now an enemy of the state.…I have become a violent act of reality inflicted upon the fiction of which we are both citizens. I want him to know that I understand this, that every thump of his truncheon hardens my resolve, that he has my permission.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
If you could take one ride in a time machine, which way would you go? The future or the past? Sally forth or turn back?...Do you prefer the costumed pageant of history or the techno-marvels to come? It seems there are two kinds of people. Both camps have their optimists as well as their pessimists. Disease is a worry. Time traveling while black or female poses special hazards. Then again, some people see ways to make money at lotteries, stock markets, and racetracks. Some just want to relive past loves. Many back travelers are driven by regret—mistakes made, opportunities lost.
”
”
James Gleick (Time Travel: A History)
“
Our Younger Stalins cabinet stands in the corner. It holds photographs of our vozhd taken ten to twenty years ago. When possible, we substitute a Younger Stalin for current ones. It's essential we convey to the people the youthful vigor of their elder statesman. The longer we do it, the further back in time we must go to find new material. Readers of certain periodicals may worry that he is growing younger with each passing year; by his seventieth birthday he will be a slender-faced adolescent.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
They are the fallen gods. The new gods are producers, creators, doers. The new gods are the chinless techno-children who would rather eat white sugar and watch science-fiction films than worry about what shoes they wear. And these poor souls desperately push papers around hoping that a mystical message will appear to save them from the new, awkward, brilliant gods and their silicon-chip reality. Some of them will survive, of course, but most will fall. Uncreative thinking is done better by machines. Poor souls, you can almost hear them sweating.
”
”
Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends (A Love Story, #1))
“
The new God is the intelligence of a living, sacred universe. The purpose that guides the evolution of species comes from larger, living wholes. The environment creates organisms for its purposes, as much as organisms alter the environment for theirs. The parts create the whole, and the whole creates the parts. 20 Thirteen years ago when I first began telling people I was a Lamarckian, I was met with eye rolls or blank stares. But last week I confessed it to a biologist I met at a conference and he didn’t bat an eye. “Everyone is a Lamarckian now,” he said. “Lamarck was right.” This is no longer fringe science. I refer the interested or skeptical reader to James Shapiro’s Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, Denis Noble’s Dance to the Tune of Life, and Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire. The Whole has created humans too for its purpose. There is a certain comfort in thinking that the planet will be fine without us, yet there is also a certain fatalism. It is akin to the fatalism that comes in response to disconnection from one’s destiny. It induces a kind of aimlessness. As humanity exits the old Story of Ascent and its triumphant techno-utopian destiny, we are indeed experiencing a collective aimlessness. In that story, our purpose was ourselves. That purpose has been exhausted. We are ready to devote ourselves to something greater. In the Story of Interbeing, entrusted with gifts and bound by love, we realize that our passage through the present initiatory crisis is of planetary moment. Out of the wreckage of what we thought we knew, something else may be born.
”
”
Charles Eisenstein (Climate: A New Story)
“
Hipsterdom’s a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The Lada's rear tires ejected dusty rooster tails, but the car wouldn't budge. I checked my phone. Zero bars. Anywhere beyond reach of MegaFon cell service is well beyond the sight of God. The roads had broken, disintegrated, and washed away the farther from Gronzy we'd come. Here, somewhere in the southern mountains, what we referred to as "road" was in fact "impending landslide".
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Banter is the doorway into a stranger's good graces and I entered guns blazing.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Even the air tasted imported from a country ranked high on the quality-of-life index.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Whatever pleasures or punishments that await in the afterlife, if there is one, must feel fainter than those that fill any given day here on earth.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
I remember the Petersburg zoo ... behind the bars a black-spotted beast took long, slinking strides. The magic and shame of something so ferociously impotent. It was our first exposure to incarceration.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Whatever life-preserving instincts evolution endowed him with have been war-blunted to an amused disregard for all mortality, particularly his own.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
The television dramas we grew up on, stories of star-crossed lovers, stories of love overcoming all obstacles, well, they’re all fairy tales, obviously, like the television news; but the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else. We’ve all ended up with men we’d pity others for marrying.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Club kids were generally urban and gay, ravers were generally suburban and straight, and goths lived in basements and spiderwebs. The ravers and club kids shared a love for techno and ecstasy, while the goths loved electronic music and old churches. So the Limelight became home for all three tribes.
”
”
Moby (Porcelain)
“
I mean, what is electronic music? Hip hop is electronic music, but people don’t think of it in that way necessarily. Some people when they talk about electronic music mean techno, which I love, but it’s not the only electronic music. Everything these days is electronic music.
”
”
Dylan Jones (Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics)
“
Galina called the camp director "a loyal citizen of the People's Republic of Bullshit" for his insistence that Swan Lake contained Marius Petipa's most sophisticated pas de deux.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
For my first year, I combed the shelves of libraries with the most recently expanded edition of Summary List of Books Excluded from Libraries and the Book Trade Network, searching for images of newly disgraced officials. This should be a librarian's job, of course, but you can't trust people who read that much.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Above the doorway hangs a bumper stricker of a fish with WWJCD? inscribed across its body, sent by an American church along with a crate of bibles in response to our plea for life-saving aid.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
This machine has surrendered without a fight. It may have beaten Kasparov but it knows better than to test me.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss’s wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth. By the time we trudged beneath them, however, the years had ravaged both the forest and the party boss’s wife, and the plastic leaves above were as sagging and liver-spotted as her face. We went on. The mud was a mustard we plodded through. On the forest’s far side we looked across the expanse of sulfurous waste stretching to the horizon. We shouted. We proclaimed. We didn’t need to whisper out here. For a few short weeks in July, red wildflowers pushed through the oxidized waste and the whole earth simmered with apocalyptic beauty.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Some people need at least a thousand kilometers between them to stay happily married. But
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
With one minute to spare, Madison arrived at the Space Needle. Her rose was hastily clipped into her short dark hair. Her cheeks were red from all of the mad rushing around. But she had made it on time.
So had Jeremy. Once again he was waiting by the elevator that rode up to the top of the Space Needle. A somewhat faded blue carnation was pinned to the lapel of his jacket.
Madison, who usually overplanned everything, hadn’t taken one second to plan what she would say when she finally met “Blue” face-to-face. A man with a bouquet of balloons passed by, and she ducked out of sight behind them. As she ran alongside the vendor, she hastily tried to collect her thoughts. So much was riding on this meeting, and she didn’t want to blow it.
When the balloon man got close to the elevator tower, Madison jumped out from behind the balloons and hid by a corner of the tower. Her mind was still a complete blank. But she couldn’t leave Jeremy standing there for another minute. So she inched her way along the wall until she was safely hidden behind the post he was leaning against.
Madison checked the TechnoMarine watch she’d borrowed from Piper. It was nearly five minutes after four. Time was running out! She had to say something. But what?
Barely a foot away, she heard Jeremy exhale in frustration, and her heart sank. When he made a move to leave, her hand shot out from behind the pillar and caught hold of his.
“Blue?” she whispered. “Please don’t turn around.”
Jeremy didn’t move. “Okay,” he said warily.
“I’m trying to find the words to tell you what our letters have meant to me,” she whispered. “And how much your friendship means to me.”
Jeremy nodded. “It’s been important to me, too.” He started to turn around, but Madison tugged his arm, hard.
“Don’t look, yet. Please!”
Jeremy quickly turned his head away. “All right, but--”
Madison didn’t let him finish. She squeezed her eyes shut and started babbling. “I didn’t know who you were until last Friday--which, incidentally, turned out to be about the most important day of my life. And when I knew it was you, I just didn’t know how to tell you that I was me. You once told me I was cold and heartless, and I just couldn’t bear it if you said it again. Everything has been so perfect, I just don’t want to blow it, and now that we’re standing here holding hands, I don’t want to let go--”
“So don’t,” a voice whispered, very close to her cheek.
”
”
Jahnna N. Malcolm (Perfect Strangers (Love Letters, #1))
“
You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else’s. His
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Risky move, maybe, but I hadn’t thought any of this through and he seemed about as trustworthy a character as I could hope to find. He’d just nodded with the glazed-over indifference of someone subjected to detailed narration of another person’s dream. I guess our lives are all dreams–as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
After working fourteen-hour shifts in the mines, inhaling so much nickel they sneezed silver glitter, none could have expected a private performance from the prima ballerina of the Kirov.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Because the future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Theory number four pertaining to the origin of demons—“Spirits of Wicked Men Deceased”—is based on the popular idea that good humans become angels and evil humans become demons at death. In what ways does our culture support this notion? Do we tell our children that loved ones (mommy, siblings, etc.) become angels
”
”
Thomas Horn (Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald The Dawn Of TechnoDimensional Spiritual Warfare TEACHER'S GUIDE)
“
It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life’s madness: The institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
Wealth announces itself with what’s easy to break and impossible to clean.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are proud, we are so proud of them. We’ve given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what keeps them alive.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
What I don’t know is whether I’ve done so out of love or loneliness, or if in this upside-down world where roofs lie on streets, intentions have lost their moral weight altogether.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)
“
These poor souls. These poor pathetic souls.” The Emperor gestured toward the passersby.
“I don’t understand,” Tommy said.
“Their time has passed and they don’t know what to do. They were told what they wanted and they believed it. They can only keep their dream alive by being with others like themselves who will mirror their illusions.”
“They have really nice shoes,” Tommy said.
“They have to look right or their peers will turn on them like starving dogs. They are the fallen gods. The new gods are producers, creators, doers. The new gods are the chinless techno-children who would rather eat white sugar and watch science-fiction films than worry about what shoes they wear. And these poor souls desperately push papers around hoping that a mystical message will appear to save them from the new, awkward, brilliant gods and their silicon-chip reality. Some of them will survive, of course, but most will fall. Uncreative thinking is done better by machines. Poor souls, you can almost hear them sweating.
”
”
Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends (A Love Story, #1))
“
But everything’s easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.
”
”
Anthony Marra (The Tsar of Love and Techno)