Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 10

She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.
Gary Shteyngart
Why nowadays there's a new fashion every day.
Leo Tolstoy
These are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don't have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora , from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don't have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over at the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they'll send troops.""We don't want the United Nations" Mr. Nanabragov said. "We don't want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We're better tan that. We want America.
Gary Shteyngart
Do not fear the conflict, do not flee it. Where there is no struggle, there is no virtue; where faith and love are not tempted, it is not possible to be sure whether they are really present. They are proved and revealed in adversity, that is, in difficult and grievous circumstances, both outward and inward - during sickness, sorrow, or privations
John of Kronstadt
Nadya Zelenin and her mother had returned from a performance of Eugene Onegin at the theatre. Going into her room, the girl swiftly threw off her dress and let her hair down. Then she quickly sat at the table in her petticoat and white bodice to write a letter like Tatyana's.'I love you,' she wrote, 'but you don't love me, you don't love me!'Having written this, she laughed.She was only sixteen and had never loved anyone yet. She knew that Gorny (an army officer) and Gruzdyov (a student) were both in love with her, but now, after the opera, she wanted to doubt their love. To be unloved and miserable: what an attractive idea! There was something beautiful, touching and romantic about A loving B when B wasn't interested in A. Onegin was attractive in not loving at all, while Tatyana was enchanting because she loved greatly. Had they loved equally and been happy they might have seemed boring.("After The Theatre")
Anton Chekhov
Once more and for the last time, the moon flashed above and broke into pieces, and then everything went black.
Mikhail Bulgakov
The squeak of oarlocks comes over the lake waterA woman's shriek assaults the earWhile above, in the sky, inured to everything,The moon looks on with a mindless leer("The Unknown Lady")
Alexander Blok
Beyond the lake the waning moon has slowed,And stands there like a window open wideInto a hushed and brightly lit abodeWhere something dreadful has occurred inside.
Anna Akhmatova
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”)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The moon hangs alien, heavy, like a lock on a door; the door is tightly shut. ("The North")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Kolya threw his shoes under the bed and went to the window. There was a full moon, light green and ugly, in the sky. It seemed to be hiding behind the treetops, spying. Its light was soft and lifeless, and its rays were tremulous and mesmerizing, as they penetrated through the branches...
Fyodor Sologub
Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.
Alexander Berkman
She'll come, if not today, then tomorrow, but she'll find me. That's the cursed romanticism of all these pure hearts! Oh the vileness, oh the stupidity, oh the narrowness, of these rotten, sentimental souls
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Whole columns are devoted to parliamentary debates and to political intrigues; while the vast everyday life of a nation appears only in the columns given to economic subjects, or in the pages devoted to reports of police and law cases. And when you read the newspapers, your hardly think of the incalculable number of beings—all humanity, so to say—who grow up and die, who know sorrow, who work and consume, think and create outside the few encumbering personages who have been so magnified that humanity is hidden by their shadows, enlarged by our ignorance.
Pyotr Kropotkin
I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.
Vladimir Nabokov
The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.
Boris Pasternak
He was nine years old; he was a child; he he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul.
Leo Tolstoy
A childish feeling, I admit, but, when we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.
Mikhail Lermontov
Woe to the heart that has not loved in youth!
Ivan Turgenev
I realized that I'm a child."William looked point-blank at her chest. "No.
Ilona Andrews
I consider jealousy a humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be influenced by it.
Leo Tolstoy
a dense wall of greenery bordered it, ...an impenetrable barrier of oaks, evergreen shrubs, blackberry that somehow resisted the frost, and thorns. In the defense department, the witches would make Sleeping Beauty’s evil witch weep with jealousy.
Ilona Andrews
There are occasions when a woman, no matter how weak and impotent in character she may be in comparison with a man, will yet suddenly become not only harder than any man, but even harder than anything and everything in the world.
Nikolai Gogol
Oh, those grumblers! They all take principles as motives and dare not follow their desires.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The task of a truly revolutionary party is not to declare that it is impossible to renounce all compromises, but to be able, through all compromises, when they are unavoidable, to remain true to its principles, to its class, to its revolutionary purpose, to its task of paving the way for revolution and educating the mass of the people for victory in the revolution.
Vladimir Lenin
Bread for me is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically.
Mikhail Bakhtin
Laughter is the deadliest weapon of all: with laughter you can murder anything, even murder.
Evgeny Zamjatin
The coffee was never served. It boiled over, spattered them all, and wet a costly tablecloth and the baroness's dress. But it served the end that was desired for it gave rise to many jests and merry peals of laughter.
Leo Tolstoy
Some sleepers have intelligent faces even in sleep, while other faces, even intelligent ones, become very stupid in sleep and therefore ridiculous. I don't know what makes that happen; I only want to say that a laughing man, like a sleeping one, most often knows nothing about his face. A great many people don't know how to laugh at all. However, there's nothing to know here: it's a gift, and it can't be fabricated. It can only be fabricated by re-educating oneself, developing oneself for the better, and overcoming the bad instincts of one's character; then the laughter of such a person might quite possibly change for the better. A man can give himself away completely by his laughter, so that you suddenly learn all of his innermost secrets. Even indisputably intelligent laughter is sometimes repulsive. Laughter calls first of all for sincerity, and where does one find sincerity? Laughter calls for lack of spite, but people most often laugh spitefully. Sincere and unspiteful laughter is mirth. A man's mirth is a feature that gives away the whole man, from head to foot. Someone's character won't be cracked for a long time, then the man bursts out laughing somehow quite sincerely, and his whole character suddenly opens up as if on the flat of your hand. Only a man of the loftiest and happiest development knows how to be mirthful infectiously, that is, irresistibly and goodheartedly. I'm not speaking of his mental development, but of his character, of the whole man. And so, if you want to discern a man and know his soul, you must look, not at how he keeps silent, or how he speaks, or how he weeps, or even how he is stirred by the noblest ideas, but you had better look at him when he laughs. If a man has a good laugh, it means he's a good man. Note at the same time all the nuances: for instance, a man's laughter must in no case seem stupid to you, however merry and simplehearted it may be. The moment you notice the slightest trace of stupidity in someone's laughter, it undoubtedly means that the man is of limited intelligence, though he may do nothing but pour out ideas. Or if his laughter isn't stupid, but the man himself, when he laughs, for some reason suddenly seems ridiculous to you, even just slightly—know, then, that the man has no real sense of dignity, not fully in any case. Or finally, if his laughter is infectious, but for some reason still seems banal to you, know, then, that the man's nature is on the banal side as well, and all the noble and lofty that you noticed in him before is either deliberately affected or unconsciously borrowed, and later on the man is certain to change for the worse, to take up what's 'useful' and throw his noble ideas away without regret, as the errors and infatuations of youth.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And indeed, if Eugene Iretnev was mentally deranged when he committed this crime, then everyone is similarly insane. The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.
Leo Tolstoy
You see, there's a theory current you're insane, or you lean strongly in that direction.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
Vladimir Nabokov
The buckets emptied quickly, and men from different squads took turns bringing water from the gully that lay towards the city, where, in the feeble shade of emaciated mulberries, a muddy stream lived out its last days in the diabolical heat.
Mikhail Bulgakov
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is... In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles. and ripples, and - as I am a Northerner - for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
Joseph Brodsky
He was going to take a dive into this lake. He just didn’t know it. Cerise rose, finding footing in the soft mud. The water came up to just below her breasts and her wet shirt stuck to her body. William’s gaze snagged on her chest. Yep, keep looking, Lord Bill. Keeeeeep looking.
Ilona Andrews
Very well." He sat cross-legged on the floor of the cage. "You haven't run off so you want to talk. I will hear your explanation now.""Really, Your Majesty? So good of you to condescend. I'll try to use small words and go slow.""You're wasting my time. I know Jim betrayed me and you're covering for him. This is your chance to dazzle me wih your brillance or baffle me with your bullshit. You won't get another. When I get out, I won't be in the mood to listen.
Ilona Andrews
Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling.
Kazimir Malevich
the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982
Leo Tolstoy
Some believe that as an icon the image of Oscar Wilde is too old and notorious--all right, not an icon, let him be our oriflamme.
Lara Biyuts
St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all things! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky; Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul.
Lev Shestov
I danced frightening things. They were frightened of me and therefore thought that I wanted to kill them. I did not want to kill anyone. I loved everyone, but no one loved me, and therefore I became nervous.
Vaslav Nijinsky
The problem is not making up the steps but deciding which ones to keep.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to to dance better than myself.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
You're not content in your position as a factory owner and a rich heiress, you don't believe in your right to it, and now you can't sleep, which, of course, is certainly better than if you were content, slept soundly, and thought everything was fine. Your insomnia is respectable; in any event, it's a good sign. In fact, for our parents such a conversation as we're having now would have been unthinkable; they didn't talk at night, they slept soundly, but we, our generation, sleep badly, are anguished, talk a lot, and keep trying to decide if we're right or not.- A Medical Case
Anton Chekhov
Only the familiar transformed by genius is truly great.
Boris Pasternak
Genius is finding the invisible link between things.
Vladimir Nabokov
The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
Vladimir Nabokov
The days of my youth, as I look back on them; seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation can.
Vladimir Nabokov
As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
Vladimir Nabokov
Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife's death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace," but others say he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
One is always at home in one's past...
Vladimir Nabokov
A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.
Anton Chekhov
A wife! No one else could love a man who had been trampled on by iron feet. She would wash his feet after he had been spat on; she would comb his tangled hair; she would look into his embittered eyes. The more lacerated his soul, the more revolting and contemptible he became to the world, the more she would love him. She would run after a truck; she would wait in queues on Kuznetsky Most, or even by the camp boundary fence, desperate to hand over a few sweets or an onion; she would bake shortbread for him on an oil stove; she would give years of her life just to be able to see him for half an hour... Not every woman you sleep with can be called a wife.
Vasily Grossman
He pressed against Master's greatcoat and rubbed him with his shoulder, which meant that he understood everything and was ready for anything, even to die if need be. Ruslan had not yet had to face death himself, but he had seen men and dogs die. There was nothing more terrible, but if he was with Master, it was another matter: that he could stand.
Georgi Vladimov
How did the hearing go?” she asked.“We won, sort of,” Kaldar said. “We die at dawn.”“The court gave the Sheeriles twenty-four hours,” William corrected.“Yes, but ‘we die at dawn the day after tomorrow’ doesn’t sound nearlyas dramatic.”“Does it have to be dramatic all the time?” Catherine murmured.“Of course. Everyone has a talent. Yours is crocheting and mine ismaking melodramatic statements.
Ilona Andrews
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It's no good writing if God hasn't given you talent. People will just laugh.
Ivan Turgenev