Georgi Gospodinov

Sometimes names really are correct by nature, as is argued in Plato’s Cratylus. There is something telling in the very etymology of the word “referendum,” if we drill down to the Latin provenance of the verb re-ferro, which means to go back, to carry back.

Some advice from me: Never, ever visit a place you left as a child after a long absence. It has been replaced, emptied of time, abandoned, ghostly

A man sets out to pull himself together by returning to the places where he grew up

I would start my first novel, so I would have somewhere to go home

to when I was going crazy

The best of them literally paid with his head, shattered by shrapnel on the front, patched together in Berlin, only to disappear six years later, found in a mass grave and only recognized by his glass eye.

While K. tells this story, it is as if he has become a different person, he looks suddenly aged, nothing of his former coldness and causticness remains, even his sharp profile has retreated. He has turned into his father, whom he is telling me about, just as sooner or later we all will turn into our fathers.

where we curse out people’s mothers as a way of saying hello

. I no longer remember who said that a nation was a group of people who have agreed to jointly remember and forget the same things.

Ernest Renan, back in the nineteenth century, I taught him to you, K. tosses in.

they rob you blind just by lookin’ at you