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“We lived in the country, I went to school, and - an important detail - I slept in my parents' room. At night it was my father's habit to read aloud to my mother. Though he was a Greek Orthodox priest, he would read anything, doubtless assuming that at my age I wouldn't understand. Usually I didn't even listen and fell asleep, unless the text was some gripping story. One night I pricked up my ears. He was reading the scene from a biography of Rasputin where the father, on his deathbed, calls his son to him and says: 'Go to Saint Petersburg and make yourself master of the city, fear nothing and no one, for God is an old hog.' Such an enormity in my father's mouth, for whom the priesthood was not a joke, impressed me as much as a conflagration or an earthquake. But I also distinctly recall - this was over fifty years ago - that my emotion was followed by a strange, dare I say a perverse pleasure.” — Emil M. Cioran