Teffi Quotes

I was afraid of maddened faces, of lanterns being shone in my eyes, of blind mindless rage. I was afraid of cold, of hunger, of darkness, of rifle butts banging on parquet floors. I was afraid of screams, of weeping, of gunshots, of the deaths of others. I was tired of it all. I wanted no more of it. I had had enough.

But do you realize that there is a dreadful force that only saints and crazed fanatics can defeat? This force closes all these doors; it makes man revolt against God, scorn science for its impotence, turn a cold shoulder to art and forget how to love… It makes death, that eternal bogeyman, come to seem welcome and blessed. This force is pain. Torturers the world over have always known this. The fear of death can be overcome by reason and by faith. But only saints and fanatics have been able to conquer the fear of pain.

He's ambitious—even excessively ambitious. He wants to become a provocateur, but he doesn't know a single revolutionary song.

Anecdotes are funny when you tell them," said Teffi. "But when you live through them it's a tragedy. And my life is one big joke-- in other words, a tragedy.

It's sad to wander about the graveyard of my tired memory, where all hurts have been forgiven, where every sin has been more that atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.

She watched him adoringly, and brightly, and exultantly—in the way you can watch only when you are wearing a new hat, a hat with a bluebird of happiness on the brim.

It was enough to make you think fondly of those early days, of that “springtime” of the revolution when your teeth would be chattering from fear, when you froze every time you heard a passing truck—would it stop at the gate or would it drive on by?—when your heart would lurch nauseatingly at the sound of rifle butts thudding against the door. Now we were only too used to it all. Everything had become boring, boring to the point of revulsion. It was all just coarse, dirty, and stupid.

And then—the languid hands dropped the uncut book. War, revolution, an absurd marriage, being chosen as the “dictator of his home town,” putting his signature to monstrous decrees, guerrilla warfare on the Volga, Admiral Kolchak, a long and terrible journey across Siberia. Odessa. Paris. Death. A deep cross-shaped fissure cutting through the black stone. The end.

It's sad to wander about the graveyard of my tired memory, where all hurts have been forgiven, where every sin has been more than atoned for, every riddle unriddled and twilight quietly cloaks the crosses, now no longer upright, of graves I once wept over.

I hurried off, clacking my heels on the pavement, so I could hear that I had returned to my ordinary everyday life.

My memories of those first days in Novorossiisk still lie behind a curtain of gray dust. They are still being whirled about by a stifling whirlwind - just as scraps of this and splinters of that, just as debris and rubbish of every kind, just as people themselves were whirled this way and that way, left and right, over the mountains or into the sea. Soulless and mindless, with the cruelty of an elemental force, this whirlwind determined our fate.

Apart from sweets, Valya was interested in very little. Though once, while drawing moustaches on some elderly aunts in a photograph album, she asked in passing, “So where is Jesus Christ now?

With my own eyes I have seen sailors taking a man out onto the ice in order to shoot him - and I have seen the condemned man hopping over puddles to keep his feet dry and turning up his collar to shield his chest from the wind. Those few steps were the last steps he would ever take, and instinctively he wanted to make them as comfortable as possible. We were no different. We bought ourselves some "last scraps" of fabric. We listened for the last time to the last operetta and the last exquisitely erotic verses. What did it matter whether the verses were good or terrible? All that mattered was not to know, not to be aware - we had to forget that we were being led onto the ice.

To your left, if you went up on deck, you saw a silent city, all dust and debris, exhausted by anxiety, fear, and typhus. And to your right, lay the boundless sea, the waves hurriedly and mindlessly buffeting one another, mounting one another and then dropping back down , crushed by other, newer waves that spat at them in foaming fury.

And like Lot's wife, I am frozen. I have turned into a pillar of salt forever, and I shall forever go on looking, seeing my own land slip softly, slowly away from me.