“Outside, in the streets, the Communist state was busy performing such experiments for real.”

It is a method for investigating how much unreality reality can bear.

Krzhizhanovsky wanted to perform imaginary experiments with the nature of time and space.

The problem with breaking up with someone, if you are a little unsure – and so often, people are unsure – is that breaking up involves persuasion.

This is because there is much more risk.

Once you have kissed secretly, it is very difficult not to have sex.

When a clandestine couple kisses, it is much more likely that sex will immediately follow.

You have to persuade your ex that it is better this way for everyone.

And this is difficult if you have not entirely persuaded yourself. It is especially tricky to do this if you are also naked, and making two cups of coffee.

It would be impolite not to have sex.

In response, Krzhizhanovsky’s prose has a recklessly unstable tone in which delighted examination of impossible worlds can slip into ferocious political sarcasm.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

If we have white persons in the March, we are certain to have trouble with the Communists, and it may not be viewed as a true expression of the Negro’s protest.

The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion.

China restricts the society’s freedom of speech. The Communist Party imposes these limits because it lacks confidence towards the future and has no ideals.

They were communists and had the same vision for Afghanistan that Stalin and Lenin had for the Soviet Union: Progress is communism plus electrification. And today? Today Kabul gets its electrical power from Uzbekistan, Herat from Iran and Jalalabad from Pakistan.

Eggheads, unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks.

The main difference between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was that the former was mostly the work of Communist party members and others who wanted to bring about ‘socialism with a human face.’

After the fall of communism in Poland, we had a post-communist as president for two terms: Aleksander Kwasniewski. He was very good. He brought Poland into NATO and the European Union.