Ivan Bad Things Quotes

Everything on earth -- both the good things and the bad things -- is not given to a man according to his just deserts, but as a result of certain as yet unknown, yet logical, laws which I won't even undertake to suggest to you, although it sometimes seems to me that I feel them as through a glass darkly.

getting lost is not always a bad thing

The pain did not subside, but Ivan Ilyich forced himself to think he was getting better. And he managed to deceive himself as long as nothing upset him. But no sooner did he have a nasty episode with his wife, a setback at work, or a bad hand at cards, than he immediately became acutely aware of his illness. In the past he had been able to cope with such adversities, confident that in no time at all he would set things right, get the upper hand, succeed, have a grand slam. Now every setback knocked the ground out from under him and reduced him to despair.

It is the greatest mistake,” he said, “to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour. We think that if a man is called Ivan he is always Ivan. Nothing of the kind. Now he is Ivan, in another minute he is Peter, and a minute later he is Nicholas, Sergius, Matthew, Simon. And all of you think he is Ivan.

I think the living room is the perfect place to put the flowers,” Alexandria agreed. “When Thomas comes over, he’ll be able to see them.” Aidan found himself gritting his teeth. Alexandria was already flitting from the kitchen. He caught Marie by the shoulder before she could follow, leaned down, and put his mouth to her ear. “Couldn’t you have thrown the damn things out?” The words came out somewhere between a hiss and a growl. “And just for the record, you traitor, Ivan is not her man. I am.” Marie looked shocked. “Not yet, you’re not. I believe you still have to court her. And of course I would never throw roses out, Aidan. When a man goes to the trouble of giving a woman flowers, she should at least have the pleasure of seeing them.” “I thought you didn’t like this bum.” “He can’t be all bad. You should have seen his concern for her. I tell you, Aidan, he’s really taken with her.” Marie was deliberately, innocently, enthusiastic. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about her when she’s with him.” She attempted to sound reassuring. Behind them, Stefan was choking again. Aidan swore eloquently in three languages and followed Alexandria out of the room, shaking his head over the workings of the female mind. Stefan put an arm around Marie. “Wicked, wicked woman.” She laughed softly. “This is fun, Stefan. And it’s good for him.” “Be careful, woman. He is not like other men. He might kill to keep her. His nature is that of a wild predator,” Stefan warned gravely. “We’ve never seen him like this.

Naomi: im cooking lol Naomi: if its bad we can order in Naomi: what time you home ? She has attached a picture: his small green casserole dish on one of the hotplates. Disorientated feeling, as though his centre of gravity disturbed, walls shifting: like passing out, he thinks. As if he will pass out there and then, and at the thought, remembering, he sits down on a kitchen chair. The little green dish on the stovetop, what time you home. Christ, he thinks, what is he doing, what on earth. In the bath the other night, murmuring in her ear, I want you to be happy. Was he lying then: and why, for what, for what possible reason. Strong sudden impulse he feels to begin praying, already mouthing the silent words, and then frightened by himself he stops. To pray for what: forgiveness, guidance. From whom: God he barely believes in, sentimental Jesus commanding us to love one another. In over his head, fathoms over, and something has to be done. How capable he has been of holding in his mind with no apparent struggle such contradictory beliefs and feelings. The false true lover, the cynical idealist, the atheist at his prayers. Everything lethally intermixed, everything breaching its boundaries, nothing staying in its right place. She, the other, himself. Even Christine, Ivan, this married girlfriend of his. Their father: from beyond the grave. Conceptual collapse of one thing into another, all things into one. No. To answer first the simple question of where to sleep tonight. Marry me. I love you. What time you home.

Alyosha heard Shukhov’s whispered prayer, and, turning to him: “There you are, Ivan Denisovich, your soul is begging to pray. Why don’t you give it it’s freedom?” Shukhov stole a look at him. Alyosha’s eyes glowed like two candles. “Well, Alyosha,” he said with a sigh, “it’s this way. Prayers are like those appeals of ours. Either they don’t get through or they’re returned with ‘rejected’ scrawled across ’em.” Outside the staff quarters were four sealed boxes–they were cleared by a security officer once a month. Many were the appeals that were dropped into them. The writers waited, counting the weeks: there’ll be a reply in two months, in one month. . . . But the reply doesn’t come. Or if it does it’s only “rejected.” “But, Ivan Denisovich, it’s because you pray too rarely, and badly at that. Without really trying. That’s why your prayers stay unanswered. One must never stop praying. If you have real faith you tell a mountain to move and it will move. . . .” Shukhov grinned and rolled another cigarette. He took a light from the Estonian. “Don’t talk nonsense, Alyosha. I’ve never seen a mountain move. Well, to tell the truth, I’ve never seen a mountain at all. But you, now, you prayed in the Caucasus with all that Baptist society of yours–did you make a single mountain move?” They were an unlucky group too. What harm did they do anyone by praying to God? Every damn one of them had been given twenty-five years. Nowadays they cut all cloth to the same measure–twenty-five years. “Oh, we didn’t pray for that, Ivan Denisovich,” Alyosha said earnestly. Bible in hand, he drew nearer to Shukhov till they lay face to face. “Of all earthly and mortal things Our Lord commanded us to pray only for our daily bread. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.'” “Our ration, you mean?” asked Shukhov. But Alyosha didn’t give up. Arguing more with his eyes than his tongue, he plucked at Shukhov’s sleeve, stroked his arm, and said: “Ivan Denisovich, you shouldn’t pray to get parcels or for extra stew, not for that. Things that man puts a high price on are vile in the eyes of Our Lord. We must pray about things of the spirit–that the Lord Jesus should remove the scum of anger from out hearts. . . .” Page 156: “Alyosha,” he said, withdrawing his arm and blowing smoke into his face. “I’m not against God, understand that. I do believe in God. But I don’t believe in paradise or in hell. Why do you take us for fools and stuff us with your paradise and hell stories? That’s what I don’t like.” He lay back, dropping his cigarette ash with care between the bunk frame and the window, so as to singe nothing of the captain’s below. He sank into his own thoughts. He didn’t hear Alyosha’s mumbling. “Well,” he said conclusively, “however much you pray it doesn’t shorten your stretch. You’ll sit it out from beginning to end anyhow.” “Oh, you mustn’t pray for that either,” said Alyosha, horrified. “Why do you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul. As the Apostle Paul wrote: ‘Why all these tears? Why are you trying to weaken my resolution? For my part I am ready not merely to be bound but even to die for the name of the Lord Jesus.

A man can survive ten years--but twenty-five, who can get through alive? Shukhov rather enjoyed having everybody poke a finger at him as if to say: Look at him, his term's nearly up. But he had his doubts about it. Those zeks who finished their time during the war had all been "retained pending special instructions" and had been released only in '46. Even those serving three-year sentences were kept for another five. The law can be stood on its head. When your ten years are up they can say, "Here's another ten for you." Or exile you. Yet there were times when you thought about it and you almost choked with excitement. Yes, your term really _is_ coming to an end; the spool is unwinding. . . . Good God! To step out to freedom, just walk out on your own two feet. But it wasn't right for an old-timer to talk about it aloud, and Shukhov said to Kilgas: "Don't you worry about those twenty-five years of yours. It's not a fact you'll be in all that time. But that I've been in eight full years--now that is a fact." Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out. According to his dossier, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov had been sentenced for high treason. He had testified to it himself. Yes, he'd surrendered to the Germans with the intention of betraying his country and he'd returned from captivity to carry out a mission for German intelligence. What sort of mission neither Shukhov nor the interrogator could say. So it had been left at that- -a mission. Shukhov had figured it all out. If he didn't sign he'd be shot If he signed he'd still get a chance to live. So he signed. But what really happened was this. In February 1942 their whole army was surrounded on the northwest front No food was parachuted to them. There were no planes. Things got so bad that they were scraping the hooves of dead horses--the horn could be soaked In water and eaten. Their ammunition was gone. So the Germans rounded them up in the forest, a few at a time. Shukhov was In one of these groups, and remained in German captivity for a day or two. Then five of them managed to escape. They stole through the forest and marshes again, and, by a miracle, reached their own lines. A machine gunner shot two of them on the spot, a third died of his wounds, but two got through. Had they been wiser they'd have said they'd been wandering in the forest, and then nothing would have happened. But they told the truth: they said they were escaped POW's. POW's, you fuckers! If all five of them had got through, their statements could have been found to tally and they might have been believed. But with two it was hopeless. You've put your damned heads together and cooked up that escape story, they were told. Deaf though he was, Senka caught on that they were talking about escaping from the Germans, and said in a loud voice: "Three times I escaped, and three times they caught me." Senka, who had suffered so much, was usually silent: he didn't hear what people said and didn't mix in their conversation. Little was known about him--only that he'd been in Buchenwald, where he'd worked with the underground and smuggled in arms for the mutiny; and how the Germans had punished him by tying his wrists behind his back, hanging him up by them, and whipping him. "You've been In for eight years, Vanya," Kilgas argued. "But what camps? Not 'specials.' You bad breads to sleep with. You didn't wear numbers. But try and spend eight years in a 'special'--doing hard labor. No one's come out of a 'special' alive." "Broads! Boards you mean, not broads." Shukhov stared at the coals in the stove and remeinbered his seven years in the North. And how he worked for three years hauling logs--for packing cases and railroad ties. The flames in the campfires had danced up there, too--at timber-felling during the night. Their chief made it a rule that any squad that had failed to meet its quota had to stay In the forest after dark.

[The Death of Ivan Ilych is] possibly the best short story ever written, depending on whether or not you consider The Leopard [Giuseppe di Lampedusa] to be a short story, but it is only about 50 pages or so. It describes how easy it is to go through life, in the same way as Eliot describes in ‘Prufrock’, trying to please everyone and to be a good person, to conform, without really having any authentic intimacy with anyone. And the great importance really of waking up and smelling the coffee and seeing that the superficial things in life really are superficial and that what actually matters is how you conduct yourself in your relationships with your intimates. Well [Tolstoy]... was [bad at that], yes. And, er, that’s true, of course, of many authors. They can be extraordinarily adept at writing stories about the things that they are unable to do themselves. [Defining authentic intimacy...] ...that’s a whole subject but sincerity is that you feel passionately that something is real and important, as opposed to authenticity where you divine internal truth, your true feeling and also external truth, the true feeling of other people. It’s not about being Tony Blair who is sincere but inauthentic; it’s about being… well, who? It’s very difficult to know, though, because these people are so good at presenting themselves. Somebody who is authentic in the public eye… well, very few people. Most high achievers are not very authentic. Unless you know people very well it’s hard to judge. [I suppose the point of superficiality is that it’s a defence against vulnerability. Being authentic makes you terribly vulnerable.] I don’t think it’s the same thing as telling the truth. My mother, in her later years after my father died, was a good example of someone who became very wise when she got older. If she watched me doing something stupid, she wouldn’t say: ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid,’ but she’d ask a question: ‘I wonder if you’ve thought about this or that?’ If I didn’t want to hear any more she would let it go. She didn’t try to impose her version on me but at the same time she tried to signal what she felt was true. She certainly didn’t tell lies. An authentic person in an inauthentic environment, like a corporate headquarters or a television company, might need to construct quite an elaborate persona and it might entail… well, keeping your mouth shut a lot.

{The Death of Ivan Ilych is} possibly the best short story ever written, depending on whether or not you consider The Leopard [Giuseppe di Lampedusa] to be a short story, but it is only about 50 pages or so. It describes how easy it is to go through life, in the same way as Eliot describes in ‘Prufrock’, trying to please everyone and to be a good person, to conform, without really having any authentic intimacy with anyone. And the great importance really of waking up and smelling the coffee and seeing that the superficial things in life really are superficial and that what actually matters is how you conduct yourself in your relationships with your intimates. Well [Tolstoy]... was [bad at that], yes. And, er, that’s true, of course, of many authors. They can be extraordinarily adept at writing stories about the things that they are unable to do themselves. [Defining authentic intimacy...] ...that’s a whole subject but sincerity is that you feel passionately that something is real and important, as opposed to authenticity where you divine internal truth, your true feeling and also external truth, the true feeling of other people. It’s not about being Tony Blair who is sincere but inauthentic; it’s about being… well, who? It’s very difficult to know, though, because these people are so good at presenting themselves. Somebody who is authentic in the public eye… well, very few people. Most high achievers are not very authentic. Unless you know people very well it’s hard to judge. [I suppose the point of superficiality is that it’s a defence against vulnerability. Being authentic makes you terribly vulnerable.] I don’t think it’s the same thing as telling the truth. My mother, in her later years after my father died, was a good example of someone who became very wise when she got older. If she watched me doing something stupid, she wouldn’t say: ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid,’ but she’d ask a question: ‘I wonder if you’ve thought about this or that?’ If I didn’t want to hear any more she would let it go. She didn’t try to impose her version on me but at the same time she tried to signal what she felt was true. She certainly didn’t tell lies. An authentic person in an inauthentic environment, like a corporate headquarters or a television company, might need to construct quite an elaborate persona and it might entail… well, keeping your mouth shut a lot.

God alone knows what lies in store for you, and what things you will be seeing, both good and bad. I only hope that Our Heavenly Father will give you strength; but you, my dear, whatever you do, don't forget him, and remember: without faith there is no salvation anywhere or in anything.