The Quotation Of The Day Mailing List
Quotation of the Day for January 5, 2004
"He did not begin on the vodka at once but gradually stole up to it as it were. Everything around him was dead asleep; only mice scratched behind the wall-paper that had become unstuck.... Taking off his dressing-gown, with nothing but his shirt on he scurried up and down the heated room; sometimes he stopped, came up to the table fumbling for the bottle, and then began walking again. He drank the first glasses making traditional drinker's jokes and voluptuously sipping the burning liquid; but gradually his tongue began babbling something incoherent, his heart beat faster, and his head was on fire. His dulled mind struggled to create images, his deadened memory strove to break through into the realm of the past.... All there was before him was the present in the shape of a tightly locked prison in which the idea of space and time disappeared without a trace.... But as the contents of the bottle diminished...even his limited consciousness of the present became too much for him. His muttering, which at first had some semblance of rational speech, grew utterly meaningless.... It was a dead, endless void...without a single sound of life."
- Shchedrin (the pen name of M.E. Saltykov), from his novel The Golovlyov Family, written in the 1870s.
Submitted by: Terry Labach
Dec. 2, 2003