Thursday, December 23, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Yanks speak of the American Dream.
We don't speak of the Armenian Dream
because we don't have one.
What we have in great abundance instead is nightmares.
*
Acknowledging blunders makes one humble, cautious, and wise.
Refusing to acknowledge them makes one arrogant, self-righteous, and stupid.
*
Whenever I see an anonymous insult
in a discussion forum on the Internet
I think he must be a bishop or the son of a bi-
shop.
*
The greatest misfortune that can befall a writer
is being born an Armenian.
The only benefit: no matter how many lies you expose,
you will never run out of them.
*
Emigration, alienation, assimilation, assassination:
they too are expressions of dissent.
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Puzant Granian: “We have many national benefactors
but not a single national writer.”
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Anonymous: “In his own home a mouse is a lion.”
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Anonymous: “Patience is a tough tree that bears sweet fruit.”
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Vahram Papazian: “The greater your worth
the greater the pleasure of the worthless to tear you down.”
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Friday, December 24, 2010
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HUMBUG
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The closer to the truth I get,
the more enemies I make.
*
For most of my life I thought my function as a writer was to inspire pride in my readers – even as I was degraded, insulted, lied to, and forced to flatter the colossal egos of megalomaniacal nonentities.
But then I saw the light and was born again as a human being,
after which things got from bad to worse.
There are no happy endings in Armenian literature.
If it's not TB, it's Turks;
if it's not Turks, it's commissars;
and if its not commissars
it's our own Ottomanized and Sovietized partisans and panchoonies.
*
I don't write to be controversial.
I write as a human being for readers who have shed their status as dehumanized dupes.
*
Here on earth money may perform miracles,
but in hell it can't even buy an ice cube.
*
Is there life after death?
The answer to that question is so valuable that its price is death.
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