01c. 1910 ADYou 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.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
02c. 1910 ADA 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.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
03c. 1910 ADDon'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.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
04c. 1910 ADCruel', 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.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
05c. 1910 ADHappiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
06c. 1910 ADWe have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
07c. 1910 ADI'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...Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
09c. 1910 ADTrue literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
10c. 1910 ADHeretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
13c. 1910 ADThe most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
14c. 1910 ADIt is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
15c. 1910 ADBut 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")Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
16c. 1910 ADThe 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?Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
17c. 1910 ADDarkness. 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.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
18c. 1910 ADThe only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
19c. 1910 ADI walked alone through the twilit street. The wind was whirling, driving, carrying me like a slip of paper. Fragments of cast-iron sky flew and flew-they had another day, two days to hurtle through infinity… The unifs of passersby brushed against me, but I walked alone. I saw it clearly: everyone was saved, but there was no salvation for me. I did not want salvation …"(c)Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
20c. 1910 ADI 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.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
21c. 1910 ADAccentuated 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.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
22c. 1910 ADIf we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
23c. 1910 ADLife 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")Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
24c. 1910 ADBut if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. (“Letter To Stalin”)Yevgeny Zamyatin / quote ↗
