Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you you hate it because you are afraid of it you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you dont know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldnt even be worth reading.

Dont forget that we lawyers, were a higher breed of intellect, and so its our privilege to lie. Its as clear as day. Animals cant even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.

Cruel, OKelly laughed, its cruel to tell children the truth. If anything convinces me of Gods mercy, then its his gift of making us unable to lie.

Happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. (X)

Im like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating - a minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and thatll be the end of everything. I need a quick splash of cold water, logic. I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist. Well, of course, its clear that you cant establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And its also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid dissolving in the universe, if you take it to its limit, is death. Because thats exactly what death is - the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e., love and death...

knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.(Literature, Revolution, and Entropy)

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

We need writers who fear nothing. (Our Goal)

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this once in a thousand years has come today.

But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible. And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. (In Old Russia)

The suns champagne streamed from one body into another. And there was a couple on the green silk of the grass, covered by a raspberry umbrella. Only their feet and a little bit of lace could be seen. In the magnificent universe beneath the raspberry umbrella, with closed eyes, they drank in the sparkling madness.Extra! Extra! Zeppelins over the North Sea at 3 oclock.But under the umbrella, in the raspberry universe, they were immortal. What did it matter that in another far-away universe people would be killing each other?

Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium...Something had happened. The black sky above London burst into fragments: white triangles, squares and lines - the silent geometric delirium of searchlights. The blinded elephant buses rushed somewhere headlong with their lights extinguished. The distinct patter along the asphalt of belated couples, like a feverish pulse, died away. Everywhere doors slammed and lights were put out. And the city lay deserted, hollow, geometric, swept clean by a sudden plague: silent domes, pyramids, circles, arches, towers, battlements.

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

I walked alone through the twilit street. The wind was whirling, driving, carrying me like a slip of paper. Fragments of cast-iron sky flew and flew-they had another day, two days to hurtle through infinity… The unifs of passersby brushed against me, but I walked alone. I saw it clearly: everyone was saved, but there was no salvation for me. I did not want salvation …(c)

I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, all lips. Some are pink and firmly round: a ring, a tender guardrail from the whole world. And then there are these ones: a second ago they weren’t here, and just now — like a knife-slit — they are here, still dripping sweet blood.