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"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation."
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"Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold."
"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."
"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
"This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power."
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
"No, said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time."
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something - distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world - but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before."
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
Explore more quotes by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
"The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble."
"Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."
"It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God's heaven."
"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice."
"For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion."
"Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation."
"Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one's well-being."
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