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Quotes by Russian Authors
"As I understand I took most so-called democratic states about 200 years on average to build their democracies. That is why, when we go to sleep under totalitarian rule and wake up in a democracy, it makes me laugh."
"Up to nineteen seventy six when I quit gymnastics I was very, disappointed because I didn't have anything which is, live with. I didn't have a friend so I didn't have a coach anymore."
"Shukhov stared at the ceiling and said nothing. He no longer knew whether he wanted to be free or not...it had gradually dawned on him that people like himself were not allowed to go home but were packed off into exile. And there was no knowing where the living was easier " here or there. The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home. But they wouldn't let him go home."
"When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of human."
"Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live."
"Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking, to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality."
"Finally, as the digestive canal is a complex system, a series of separate chemical laboratories, I cut the connections between them in order to investigate the course of phenomena in each particular laboratory; thus I resolved the digestive canal into several separate parts."
"One should never direct people towards happiness, becausehappiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should directthem towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its preycan be happy too, but only human beings can feel affectionfor each other, and this is the highest achievement they canaspire to."
"Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory."
"The kind of capitalism I hate most is crony capitalism, the friends who decide. These are things which should be killed in Russia."
"Why I would sell the whole world for a single kopek, just so that nobody would bother me. Should the world go to hell, or should I go without my tea now? I'll say let the world go to hell so long as I can have my tea whenever I want it."
"To destroy the life that dwells in othersis beyond your power. The life of those you have slainhas vanished from your eyes, but is not destroyed. Youthought to lengthen your own life and to shorten theirs,but you cannot do this. Life knows neither time norspace. The life of a moment, and the life of a thousandyears: your life and the life of all the visible and invisiblebeings in the world, are equal. To destroy life, or to alterit, is impossible; for life is the one thing that exists. Allelse, but seems to us to be."
"I tried a dozen different modifications that were rejected. But they all served as a path to the final design."
"You said just now, "Don't be so ashamed of yourself, because that's the root of your trouble"""with those words, you seem to have reached right into my innermost soul. What I mean is, when I visit people, I always feel that I'm really the lowest of the low, that everybody takes me for a buffoon, so I say to myself, why shouldn't I act the fool, I'm not afraid of what any of you might think, because every single one of you is even worse than me. That's why I'm a buffoon, I'm a buffoon born of shame, great starets, of shame. It's anxiety pure and simple that makes me so unruly."
"An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures."
"To be sure, the vast majority of people who are untrained can accept the results of science only on authority."
"We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes."
"As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world."
"I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed... here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars."
"For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
"Thanks to nanny, I've got a deep understanding of Russian tales."
"I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril."
"The diversification of the people's demand could not be followed by the state apparatus."
"How many people in the world is, each of them is individual. And I like to eat bread, somebody don't like that. You know this is the same in gymnastics."
"In 1995 the whole political situation was very complicated. I was the first deputy prime minister, and at the same time I had very low influence in the government."
"It was almost forbidden in the Soviet Union to study the New Economic Policy."
"Someone that you have deprived of everything is no longer in your power. He is once again entirely free."
"Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good. . . and there are gooseberries."
"Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated."
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