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“I dismissed this course of action, sensing my own reserves of strengths, but I experimented with the idea and took it as far as I could in a game I christened Bus Stop: on summer nights, I would stretch out on the road in front of my house, on hot, grainy asphalt scattered with sharp bits of gravel, and watch and wait for growling motors, the blinding movement of headlights, and I weighed up the pros and cons, what tied me to life like a blood oath, what left me cold, or tired me out; and when the noise grew sharper, more grating, and when the headlights from the first bend in the road began to cut out the sides of the buildings and project a slow, revolving shadow dance on the wall, I always came back to the same conclusion - that I felt something stir inside me, as hazy and phony as a childhood memory, as insistent as a hit song you'd heard so often you couldn't get its bitterness out of your head, something that promised me a better future, only somewhere else. And I would unpeel myself from the road, I'd pick myself up, what was left of me, what could still be of some use, and slowly make my way back to the pink gravel of the sidewalk, just like the one my little retarded friend was standing on this morning as stoic as an abandoned house awaiting demolition.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man's stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama

“But if neither sadness or rage could unite us, I didn't know what could - the more I wanted to identify with her, the more I identified with myself; and the more I tried to understand her, the less, necessarily, I succeeded: the failure of an intelligent mind to grasp feeblemindedness was dark and deep, no less than the failure of a feeble mind to grasp intelligence, because intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered in the diamond-dusted whiteness. There's always something soothing in the snow, thought Gabriel, a promise of happiness and absolution, of a new start on a clean sheet. Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that New Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it. He wallowed in the impression, badly needing it right now, knowing it would not last as he hobbled nearer to his destination.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama

“Don't we all discover, at some stage or another that there are some things we'll never get any better at, even though we have no idea why and hardly ever notice it when it happens, even though we may have enjoyed these things and might not have been lagging behind last time we checked? Learning to draw, for instance, was a familiar catastrophe - all of a sudden, unaware, you just stop getting any better at it, your drawings never progress beyond those of a four-year-old or a six-year-old, you're left behind by those who "can draw," condemned to producing flat, doughy figures on the page, with no sense of perspective to them and (this was what really struck me) no resemblance to the outside world: condemned by your ruined self to a shameful childhood.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“I didn't like what that word-'childhood'-conjured up, or rather, I didn't like the way most people use it: that presumption of innocence and starry-eyed wonder. The only good thing about childhood is that no one really remembers it, or rather, that's the only thing about it to like: this forgetting. What else could possibly lie beneath that blissful oblivion but shame: a dark knowledge of that terrible badge of weakness, that inescapable servitude (bearable only thanks to the slow revelation that we could inflict cruelty and evil on the weaker kids), a sickening awareness that just about everything there is to understand was beyond us, made even worse by the lies and inaccuracies that adults feel entitled to spread around, deliberately, or because they don't know any better, about themselves or about the nature of reality?”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“... Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“The notion of this powerful childhood gaze was all the more specious given that adults, in the name of that very spontaneity, subjected chidren to every sort of rehearsed and prepackaged foolishness so that what children were supposed to see and like was no more than the adults' idea of what they imagined having lost themselves, which in turn was probably no more than other versions of childhood recycled by other adults, this cycle of loss building itself up according to the endless demands of nostalgia, so that the older and more rotten the world became, the more this driveling idocy prevailed and this idea of innocence took hold. Grown-ups tried to sweeten the pill, but there was no hiding it, children were the most oppressed creatures on earth.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“This isn't the time for bravado, Mr. Orsini,' he said.

Brentford couldn't help himself. 'No, it isn't,' he said. 'Perhaps you could come back later?”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“I heard a song that nailed it: "And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion / I'd get such a shock I'd probably lie / in the middle of the street and die." When were these so-called natural emotions and why were they worth more than the others? Hadn't I already begun to suspect that with feelings, as with revolutions, the more spontaneous-seeming were actually the outcome of long and involved tactical maneuvers? And if, unfortunately, you had to make do without being 'natural', wasn't it better to act as consciously, as deliberately, and therefore as forcefully as possible? Just because a feeling had been painstakingly pieced together didn't mean it was worthless, nor was it necessarily shallow...”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“Here, too, I recognized-easily, from firsthand experience, since this kind of thing happened at my age-the heat of the moment, the very instant you knew you should be feeling something but, for various reasons, partly due to inexperience, partly to a desynchronized, muddled teenage constitution, this emotion, however hard you tried to express it, stayed uncomfortably stuck in your heart, only half there and only half felt, just like my love for that girl across the street, the feeling I was trying to coax out of myself the way you might squeeze a toothpaste tube you'd decided to roll from the bottom up but that, distracted, and in a rush, you finally ended up pressing any which way.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“It was the French of the Normans that, grafting itself onto the barbaric Saxon tongue, gave it its most magnificent blossoming. And, in these new countries, where both English and French are intertwined again, it is as if English were bathing itself in the fountain of its own youth, and as if French were remembering the buried treasures it had thought forgotten.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“He considered each and every second as if he'd never encountered one before, as if the time it kept was a permanent surprise.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“... even if the previous millisecond is closer to us than the birth of the universe, it is equally out of reach.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“She was the living effigy of everything we will never be and, in every sense of the word, she was the retard that I was and that I wasn't, she was my vanishing, wasted talent, and I was the price society paid so that I could become what she couldn't. And this was exactly what I was trying to love; what this little girl, this girl of wire, made it known she could never be; everthing that had been, or that would be no matter who we were, borne away from each of us.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“Could it be, God forbid, that nationality is only a superficial, insignificant layer of the onion that is your being? What would you think of the man who would say of himself 'I am an overcoat' just because he happened to be wearing one?”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“I heard there was a riot.'

'There was a demonstration, which I think is different. It was peaceful until it was interrupted.'

Mason seemed to be thinking hard about it.

'What sort of demonstration?'

'Hmm... A new kind. It looked poetical at first but then became rather poletical.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama

“She understood nothing, she learned nothing, so she just stood there, lively sometimes, joyful even, a groundless joy that brought tears to their eyes, though they wished they could share these moments with her: her ecstasy over a leaf, which could last for whole minutes at a time, as though it were the most wonderful thing in the world, as though the precise bifurcations of its veins or the carefree elegance with which it swayed in the breeze was what made her clap her hands together in glee...”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, 03

“The entrance archway opened onto the vast rotunda of Hyperboree Hall. Its floor was a circular map of the polar regions, where the Arctic seas were made of white marble and the islands were cut-out slabs of polished granite decorated with little figures in minute mosaics, drawn, if Brentford remembered correctly, from the Olaus Magnus and Nicolo Zeno depictions of the North. It mixed almost accurate cartography with phantom islands, mythological monsters, and imaginary people, among whom New Venetians were prone and proud to count themselves.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama

“Vassily cleared his throat, probably impatient with Gabriel's bookshelf manners. 'You'll have to excuse me,' Gabriel said, putting back the booklet, 'I have a severe addiction to ink.'

'Don't we all?' Vassily nodded. 'Thank God we have other addictions to assuage it a little.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“A body is not unlike a pet -- stupid and dirty as it is, one becomes attached to it.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama

“I have heard about your gifts myself, Miss Roth,' read the subtitle under Brentford's awkward mumble.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“The news took a moment to sink in, probably because there was no bottom for it to alight upon.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“When in doubt, do what they do in books, was one of Gabriel's secret mottos and - that rarest of things - a principle that he actually lived by.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“Books knew more than you did, as a rule.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama

“Brentford gave the polite smile of a man who talks daily with a living mechanical head about a city in the Arctic Circle governed by hermaphrodite Siamese twins born from a dead woman, and refrained from further comments about the probable and improbable.”
― Jean-Christophe Valtat, Luminous Chaos

“They were working hard at their own myth.”
― jean-christophe valtat, Aurorarama