Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.

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.

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.

...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative...

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.

Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter - even murder itself.

I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith

There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.

We comes from God, I from the Devil.

All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”)

If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.

Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.

The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. (“A Story About The Most Important Thing”)

The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going.

A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don't know how it's going to end. Otherwise, there'd be no point in reading...

What is it to you if I don't want others to want for me, if I want to want myself — if I want the impossible...

Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children. So you're right, it's a child's question, just as it should be.

Happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?

But you can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. ("The North")

Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought. ("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

And happiness...Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one...What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign — the divine minus.

You don't look normal, dear. You look sick. Because sick and not normal are the same thing. You're destroying yourself, and no one is going to tell you that - no one.

The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")

Everyone has to go mad, it's essential fir everyone to go mad - as soon as possible! It's essential - I know.

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

You're afraid of it because it's stronger than you, you hate it because you're afraid of it, you love it because you can't master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.

Then how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

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.

She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me — and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this 'must'. A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath — and dying.

The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time.

The moon, our own, earthly moon is bitterly lonely, because it is alone in the sky, always alone, and there is no one to turn to, no one to turn to it. All it can do is ache across the weightless airy ice, across thousands of versts, toward those who are equally lonely on earth, and listen to the endless howling of dogs. (“A Story About The Most Important Thing”)

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

Listen." I tugged at my neighbor. "Just listen to me! You must-you must give me an answer: out there, where your finite universe ends! What is out there, beyond it?

The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.

Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.

We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")

You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.

I stopped and listened. But all I could hear was.. a kind of thudding, and not in me but somewhere near me... my heart.

Cruel', O'Kelly laughed, 'it's cruel to tell children the truth. If anything convinces me of God's mercy, then it's his gift of making us unable to lie.

My dear, you are a mathematician. You're even more, you're a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number.

And what is strangest of all, most unnatural of all, is that the finger hasn't got the slightest desire to be on the hand, to be with the others;

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.

The moon hangs alien, heavy, like a lock on a door; the door is tightly shut. ("The North")

Who knows who you are... A person is a novel: you don't know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth reading to the very end...

Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me-slowly, blissfully, squinting its eyes.

Колебанията са звук. Треперенето трябва да звучи. Защо не се чува?

But a thought swarmed in me; what if he, this yellow-eyed being – in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life – is happier than us?

...And what if you don't wait? You just drive over the edge yourself? Wouldn't that be the only right thing to do, the one that would solve everything?

I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, all lips. Some are pink and firmly round: a ring, a tender guardrail from the whole world. And then there are these ones: a second ago they weren’t here, and just now — like a knife-slit — they are here, still dripping sweet blood.

Yesterday, there was a Tzar and there were slaves. Today, there is no Tzar, but the slaves are still here. Tomorrow there will be only Tzars. We walk forward in the name of the free man of tomorrow, the Tzar of tomorrow. We have gone through the epoch when the masses were oppressed. We are now going through the epoch when the individual is oppressed in the name of the masses.

–¿Por qué? ¿Y por qué no tenemos plumaje ni alas, sino solamente omoplatos, las bases para las alas? Porque ya no necesitamos alas: porque tenemos aviones y las alas solamente nos estorbarían.

Oh, to the deuce with knowledge. Your much-heralded knowledge is but a form of cowardice. It is a fact! Yes, you want to encircle the infinite with a wall, and you fear to cast a glance behind the wall.

In the ancient world, this was understood by the Christians, our only (if very imperfect) predecessors: Humility is a virtue, pride a vice; We comes from God, I from the Devil.

The whole of life, in all its complexity and beauty, has been etched into the gold of words.

I never knew it before but now I know—and you, too, know—that laughter may be of different colors, Laughter is but a distant echo of an explosion within us; it may be the echo of a holiday—red, blue, and golden fireworks—or at times it may represent pieces of human flesh exploded into the air.…

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.

Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo... No, that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believe it completely, believe not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy...?

They say there are flowers that bloom only once every hundred years. Why shouldn't there be some that bloom only once every thousand, every ten thousand years? Maybe we just haven't heard about them up to now because this very day is that once-in-a-thousand-years.

He plashed away, like paddles on water, toward the door, and every step he made returned to me gradually my feet, my hands, my fingers. My soul again spread equally throughout my body. I was able to breathe.

O-90 sat over the notebook, her head leaning toward her left shoulder, and making such an effort that her tongue was pushing her left cheek out. She looked like such a child, so charming. And so I felt good all over, clear, simple...

Was it not I who populated with them all these pages—just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?

Their mistake was the mistake of Galileo. He was right that the earth revolves around the sun, but he didn't know that the entire solar system revolves around yet another center; he didn't know that the real orbit of the earth, as opposed to the relative orbit, is by no means some naive circle...

I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.

Now... what I feel these in my brain is just like... some kind of foreign body... like having a very thin little eyelash in your eye. You feel generally okay, but that eye with the last in it-you can't get it off your mind for a second.

Sizler, tanımadığım okurlarım, sizler bize oranla muhtemelen çocuksunuz (sonuçta bizim arkamızda TekDevlet var ve haliyle insan için en mümkün en yüksek doruklara erdik). Ve tıpkı çocuklar gibi, acı şeyleri ancak tatlı ve kalın bir macerayla kaplayıp verirsem yutacaksınız.

The moon climbed out of the ravine, blue, skinny, as if it had been fed on nothing but skimmed milk. It climbed out, and quickly slithered up and up along the finest thread-away from trouble, and on the very top it huddled, crouching on thin legs. ("The Protectress Of Sinners")

But why is it that within me "I don't want to" and "I want to" stand side by side? That is the chief horror of the matter; I continue to long for that happy death of yesterday. The horror of it is that even now, when I have integrated the logical function, when it becomes evident that that function contains death hidden within it, still I long for it with my lips, my arms, my heart, with every millimeter....

Why? But why don't we have feathers? Or Wings? Nothing but the shoulder blades where wings would be attached? Why, because we no longer need wings. We've got aeros. Wings would only be in the way. Wings are for flying, but we have nowhere to fly to, we've already flown there, we've found it.

The sun's champagne streamed from one body into another. And there was a couple on the green silk of the grass, covered by a raspberry umbrella. Only their feet and a little bit of lace could be seen. In the magnificent universe beneath the raspberry umbrella, with closed eyes, they drank in the sparkling madness. 'Extra! Extra! Zeppelins over the North Sea at 3 o'clock.' But under the umbrella, in the raspberry universe, they were immortal. What did it matter that in another far-away universe people would be killing each other?

They do not need the sun. Who needs the sun when the eyes glow? Darkness. A woolen fog has wrapped the earth, has dropped a heavy curtain. From far away, from beyond the curtain, comes the sound of drops falling on stone. Far, far away - the autumn, people, tomorrow. ("The North")

that ancient legend about paradise ... Why, it's about us, about today. Yes! Just think. Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom, and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they longed for the chains.

Freedom and crime are so indissolubly connected to each other, like... well, like the movement of the aero and its velocity. When the velocity of the aero = 0, it doesn't move; when the freedom of a person = 0, he doesn't commit crime. This is clear. The sole means of ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom.

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")

Gripped with bitter cold, ice-locked, Petersburg burned in delirium. One knew: out there, invisible behind the curtain of fog, the red and yellow columns, spires, and hoary gates and fences crept on tiptoe, creaking and shuffling. A fevered, impossible, icy sun hung in the fog - to the left, to the right, above, below - a dove over a house on fire. From the delirium-born, misty world, dragon men dived up into the earthly world, belched fog - heard in the misty world as words, but here becoming nothing - round white puffs of smoke. The dragon men dived up and disappeared again into the fog. And trolleys rushed screeching out of the earthly world into the unknown. ("The Dragon")

In the widely open cup of the armchair was I-330. I, on the floor, embracing her limbs, my head on her lap. We were silent. Everything was silent. Only the pulse was audible. Like a crystal I was dissolving in her, in I-330. I felt most distinctly how the polished facets which limited me in space were slowly thawing, melting away. I was dissolving in her lap, in her, and I became at once smaller and larger, and larger, unembraceable. For she was not she but the whole universe. For a second I and that armchair near the bed, transfixed with joy, we were one.

For one second I stared at her like all the others as something that had dropped out of nowhere: She was no longer a number, she was simply a person; she existed as nothing more than the metaphysical substance of the insult committed against OneState. But then some one of her movements-turning, she twisted her hips to the left-and all at once I knew: I know her, I know that body resilient as a ship-my eyes, my lips, my hands know it-in one moment I was absolutely sure of it.

White-crested waves crash on the shore. The masts sway violently, every which way. In the gray sky the gulls are circling like white flakes. Rain squalls blow past like gray slanting sails, and blue gaps open in the sky. The air brightens. A cold silvery evening. The moon is overhead, and down below, in the water; and all around it-a wide frame of old, hammered, scaly silver. Etched on the silver-silent black fishing boats, tiny black needles of masts, little black men casting invisible lines into the silver. And the only sounds are the occasional plashing of an oar, the creaking of an oarlock, the springlike leap and flip-flop of a fish. ("The North")

Tomorrow is the day of the yearly election of the Well-Doer. Tomorrow we shall again hand over to our Well-Doer the keys to the impregnable fortress of our happiness. Certainly this in no way resembles the disorderly, unorganized election days of the ancients, on which (it seems so funny!) they did not even know in advance the result of the election. To build a state on some non-discountable contingencies, to build blindly—what could be more nonsensical? Yet centuries had to pass before this was understood!

Even among the ancients the more grown-up knew that the source of right is power, that right is a function of power. So take some scales and put on one side a gram, on the other a ton; on one side "I" and on the other "We," OneState. It's clear, isn't it? - to assert that "I" have certain "rights" with respect to the State is exactly the same as asserting that a gram weighs the same as a ton. That explains the way things are divided up: To the ton go the rights, to the gram the duties. And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you're a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.

So here I am in step with everyone now, and yet I'm still separate from everyone. I am still trembling all over from the agitation I endured, like a bridge after an ancient train has rumbled over it. I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium... Something had happened. The black sky above London burst into fragments: white triangles, squares and lines - the silent geometric delirium of searchlights. The blinded elephant buses rushed somewhere headlong with their lights extinguished. The distinct patter along the asphalt of belated couples, like a feverish pulse, died away. Everywhere doors slammed and lights were put out. And the city lay deserted, hollow, geometric, swept clean by a sudden plague: silent domes, pyramids, circles, arches, towers, battlements.

But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancientes had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapour). I love - and i'm certain that i'm not mistaken if i say we love - skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality - which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects.

No matter how limited their powers of reason might have been. still they must have understood that living like that was just murder, a capital crime - except it was slow, day-by-day murder. The government (or humanity) could not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time. To kill one man - that is, to subtract 50 years from the sum of all human lives - that was a crime; but to subtract from the sum of all human lives 50,000,000 years - that was not a crime! No, really, isn't it funny? This problem in moral math could be solved in half a minute by any ten-year-old Number today, but they couldn't solve it. All their Kant's together couldn't solve it (because it never occurred to one of their Kant's to construct a system of scientific ethics - that is, one based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).

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...

I've come to read and hear many unlikely things about the times when people lived in freedom, i.e., the unorganized savage state. But the most unlikely thing, it seems to me, is this: how could the olden day governmental power - primitive though it was - have allowed people to live without anything like our Table, without the scheduled walks, without the precise regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever it occurred to them? Various historians even say that, apparently, in those times, light burned in the streets all night long, and all night long, people rode and walked the streets. This I just cannot comprehend in any way. Their faculties of reason may not have been developed, but they must have understood more broadly that living like that amounted to mass murder - literally - only it was committed slowly, day after day. The State (humaneness) forbade killing to death any one person but didn't forbid the half-killing of millions. To kill a man, that is, to decrease the sum of a human life span by fifty years - this was criminal. But decreasing the sum of many humans' lives by fifty million years - this was not criminal. Isn't that funny?

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")