The next thing I remember is my vision being completely covered by what’s on the ship’s viewscreen: what appears to be a giant, imposing-looking dead tree floating in space.  The tree’s branches strike me as looking like tentacles.  A title appears near the bottom of my vision; the title says “The Brain of God”.  I get the impression that if I enter the tree-structure and complete some task, I will be able to end the “debauchery”.

(from a really old [sophomore year of high school?] dream notes file I just found, squirreled away in the same folder as the really bad fiction I was writing at the time)

But then he has this vision of an “enlightened or integrated pornography of the future,” which is intriguing but unclear (something to do with Botticelli paintings of the Virgin Mary).

They separated and he caught a glimpse of her pale, dark-eyed, not very pretty face with its glistening lips as she slipped under his door-holding arm and after one backward glance from the first landing ran upstairs trailing her wrap with all its constellation – Cepheus and Cassiopeia in their eternal bliss, and the dazzling tear of Capella, and Polaris the snowflake on the grizzly fur of the Cub, and the swooning galaxies – those mirrors of infinite space qui m'effrayent, Blaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop – hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobat’s amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from her heaving hot bosom – heaving more than her smile suggests – and tosses to him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands.

I read this sentence while coming home on the subway drunk after midnight last night, and re-reading it now in the light of day is like reading any other sentence while coming home on the subway drunk after midnight

Reading Bend Sinister is sometimes like reading the words of some IRIS-like sci-fi being that has absorbed the entirety of the English language into its superhuman data banks but isn’t entirely sure how to use it yet

Find a ceramic dolphin that opens up to reveal another ceramic dolphin which opens up to reveal a third that contains a fourth and so on.

He was a big heavy man in his early forties, with untidy, dusty, or faintly grizzled locks and a roughly hewn face suggestive of the uncouth chess master or of the morose composer, but more intelligent. The strong compact dusky forehead had that peculiar hermetic aspect (a bank safe? a prison wall?) which the brows of thinkers possess. The brain consisted of water, various chemical compounds and a group of highly specialized fats.

“Aren’t you lowering to a considerable extent the standards by which the function, if any, of the human brain is judged?” rumbled Krug.

The iconoclasts behind this uprising, the so-called “new disintegrators,” are posed by Rosenbaum against the classicists, who seem to doubt that Shakespeare could be bettered, even by an older and wiser Shakespeare.

It tells the story of a provincial schoolteacher, Peredonov, notable for his complete lack of redeeming human qualities.

The thing about Alobar is that although he’s 1,000 years old, he still has no trouble getting laid.

His Swans Are Primal, Yet Very Precise