Цитаты из книги «Лужок Черного Лебедя», страница 18

‘Tell me. Who are your teachers?’‘We’ve got different teachers for different subjects.’‘I mean, what are the writers you revere most greatly?’‘Oh.’ I mentally scanned my bookshelf for the really impressive names. ‘Isaac Asimov. Ursula Le Guin. John Wyndham.’‘Assy-Smurf? Ursular Gun? Wind-’em? These are modern poets?’‘No. Sci-fi, fantasy. Stephen King, too. He’s horror.’‘“Fantasy”? Pffft! Listen to Ronald Reagan’s homilies! “Horror?” What of Vietnam, Afghanistan, South Africa? Idi Amin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot? Is not enough horror? I mean, who are your masters? Chekhov?’‘Er…no.’‘But you have read Madame Bovary?’(I’d never heard of her books.) ‘No.’‘Not even,’ she looked ratty now, ‘Hermann Hesse?’‘No.’ Unwisely I tried to dampen Madame Crommelynck’s disgust. ‘We don’t really do Europeans at school…’‘“Europeans”? England is now drifted to the Caribbean? Are you African? Antarctican? You are European, you illiterate monkey of puberty! Thomas Mann, Rilke, Gogol! Proust, Bulgakov, Victor Hugo! This is your culture, your inheritance, your skeleton! You are ignorant even of Kafka?’I flinched. ‘I’ve heard of him.’‘This?’ She held up Le Grand Meaulnes.‘No, but you were reading it last week.’‘Is one of my bibles. I read it every year. So!’ She frisbeed the hardback book at me, hard. It hurt. ‘Alain-Fournier is your first true master. He is nostalgic and tragic and enchantible and he aches and you will ache too and, best of everything, he is true.’

‘If your dad’s a famous composer, and your mum’s an aristocrat, you can do things that you can’t do if your dad works at Greenland Supermarkets and if you go to a comprehensive school. Poetry’s one of those things.’

And I say, “Go to the hell! What is wrong with onions-and-berets? I am Madame and my “e” is strongly attached!”

Джейсон — не особенно крутое имя, но если бы в нашу школу забрел какой-нибудь Лоренцо, его бы сожгли бунзеновскими горелками до смерти.

В спортивных и всяких других играх главное — не победа и даже не участие. На самом деле главная цель — унизить противника.

Я думаю о том, как лидеры умеют чувствовать страх толпы и обращать его в луки, стрелы, мушкеты, гранаты и атомные бомбы, а потом использовать на свои цели. Это и есть власть.