Quotes By Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin
“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”)”
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“I’m 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 that’ll 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, it’s clear that you can’t establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it’s also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid “dissolving in the universe,” if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that’s 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…”
“We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. (“X”)”
“True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”
“Happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.”
“Don’t forget that we lawyers, we’re a higher breed of intellect, and so it’s our privilege to lie. It’s as clear as day. Animals can’t 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.”
“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.”