Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 44

How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.
Osip Mandelstam
The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Vladimir Nabokov
I have brushed my teeth.This day and I are even.
Vera Pavlova
I opened my veins. Unstoppablylife spurts out with no remedy.Now I set out bowls and plates.Every bowl will be shallow.Every plate will be small.And overflowing their rims,into the black earth, to nourishthe rushes unstoppablywithout cure, gushespoetry ...
Marina Tsvetaeva
The horses suddenly began to neigh, protestingAgainst those who were drowning them in the ocean.The horses sank to the bottom, neighing, neighing.Until they had all gone down.That is all. Nevertheless, I pity them,Those bay horses, that never saw land again.
Boris Slutsky
On I’ll pass,dragging my huge love behind me.On whatfeverish night, deliria-ridden,by what Goliaths was I begot – I, so bigand by no one needed?
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.
Boris Pasternak
This cruel age has deflected me,like a river from this course.Strayed from its familiar shores,my changeling life has flowedinto a sister channel.How many spectacles I've missed:the curtain rising without me,and falling too. How many friendsI never had the chance to meet.
Anna Akhmatova
while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Vladimir Nabokov
February. Get ink, shed tears.Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,While torrential slush that roarsBurns in the blackness of the spring.Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,Race through the noice of bells and wheelsTo where the ink and all you grievingAre muffled when the rainshower falls.To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,Fall down into the puddles, hurlDry sadness deep into the eyes.Below, the wet black earth shows through,With sudden cries the wind is pitted,The more haphazard, the more trueThe poetry that sobs its heart out.
Boris Pasternak
Don't you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?
Marina Tsvetaeva
One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.
Marina Tsvetaeva
Listen! If stars are litIt means there is someone who needs it,It means someone wants them to be,That someone deems those specks of spitMagnificent!
Vladimir Mayakovsky
As the future ripens in the past,so the past rots in the future --a terrible festival of dead leaves.
Anna Akhmatova
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
Joseph Brodsky
You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
Anna Akhmatova
My turn shall also come:I sense the spreading of a wing.
Osip Mandelstam
Stop smiling as if I’ve been acquainted with you for ages!
Olga Goa
Everyone thinks to the extent of their own depravity.
Olga Goa
If you were three times poor, I would still have paid attention to you and fell head over heels in love with you.
Olga Goa
I need only you, Milano, not your money.
Olga Goa
It's just like in a Brazilian serial! Destiny has brought us together.
Olga Goa
I'm afraid that if we move on to such topics, I won't be able to let you go safe and sound.
Olga Goa
And you haven’t got a ‘pause’ button, have you? You are just uncontrollable!
Olga Goa
Everyone thinks to the extent of their own depravity,” #HenriettaLedyanova , #FatefulItalianPassion .
Olga Goa
Don't be shy, dear. I'm too old for you to be embarrassed by me.” #RicardoAlonso , #FatefulItalianPassion.
Olga Goa
I don't want you to leave. I want you to stay.
Olga Goa
A brave girl! And a unique one. The best that I have ever met in my life.
Olga Goa
You're very naive and innocent, and don't understand a lot of things yet.
Olga Goa
I swear I won't touch you even with a finger until you ask me yourself.
Olga Goa
Don't be shy, dear. I'm too old for you to be embarrassed by me.
Olga Goa
The words of men cannot be trusted, especially men like you!
Olga Goa
If you go on touching me, I’ll catch fire before your eyes.
Olga Goa
I cannot believe that you're still a girl. Your kisses don’t seem that innocent. They are driving me crazy.
Olga Goa
I’m giving pleasure to you. Don’t interfere.
Olga Goa
Forget everything that surrounds you. Think that there’s just you and me in this wide world.
Olga Goa
I think the word ‘pleasure’ is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning.
Olga Goa
You are like a narcotic plant.
Olga Goa
If your parents left you, it doesn’t mean that other people will also do it to you.
Olga Goa
Scusi mia bella*, but it runs in the blood of all Italians to be skillful lovers. So you have to get used to this.
Olga Goa
You can't push me away, mio cuore. You can't!
Olga Goa
El ser humano ha sido siempre un asesino muy superior al resto de criaturas".
Dmitry Glukhovsky
There are far more reasons for death than there are for life.
Sergei Lukyanenko
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...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Vladimir Nabokov
I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
They are stupid, they are beasts, they are meat, they are death. I am talking simply but without any affectation.
Vaslav Nijinsky
Змейк беседовал в углу с двумя металлами, недавно пробившимися из глубин Земли и не имеющими понятия о формах жизни на ее поверхности. Со всей вежливостью принимающей стороны он занимал гостей беседой, но трудно было сказать, насколько эта беседа занимала его самого. Собственно, Змейк собирался рассказать анекдот, однако необходимая для понимания анекдота преамбула даже при лаконичности Змейка потребовала не меньше минуты:— Люди состоят из соединений углерода и потребляют кислород. Смерть есть прекращение химических реакций одного типа, — Змейк поймал на себе взгляд Гвидиона, которого явно заинтересовал его учитель, дающий определение смерти, и спокойно закончил: — и начало совершенно иных химических реакций.
Anna Korostelyova
Let my heiress have full rights,Live in my house, sing songs that I composed.Yet how slowly my strength ebbs,How the tortured breast craves air.The love of my friends, my enemies' rancorAnd the yellow roses in my bushy garden,And a lover's burning tenderness—all thisI bestow upon you, messenger of dawn.Also the glory for which I was born,For which my star, like some whirlwind, soaredAnd now falls. Look, its fallingProphesies your power, love and inspiration.Preserving my generous bequest,You will live long and worthily.Thus it will be. You see, I am content,Be happy, but remember me.
Anna Akhmatova
But when, as is most often the case, the husband and wife accept the external obligation to live together all their lives and have, by the second month, come to loathe the sight of each other, want to get divorced and yet go on living together, it usually ends in that terrible hell that drives them to drink, makes them shoot themselves, kill and poison each other
Leo Tolstoy
It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!" "So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death.
Leo Tolstoy
Ever peaceful be you slumberThough your days were few in numberOn this earth-spite took its toll-Yet shall heaven have your soulWith pure love we did regard youFor your loved one did we guard youBut you came not to the groomOnly to a chill dark tomb
Alexander Pushkin
Flowers, cold from the dew,And autumn's approaching breath,I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,Which haven't faded yet.In their nights, fragrantly resinous,Entwined with delightful mystery,They will breathe in her springlikeExtraordinary beauty.But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,From her shing head they will flutterAnd fall—and before herThey will die, faintly fragrant still.And, impelled by faithful longing,My obedient gaze will feast upon them—With a reverent hand,Love will gather their rotting remains.
Anna Akhmatova
The more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and that there was no help for it, Yes it was terrible but true
Leo Tolstoy
All his life the example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic - "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal" - had seemed to him to be true only in relation to Caius the man, man in general, and it was quite justified , but he wasn't Caius and he wasn't man in general, and he had always been something quite, quite special apart from all other beings; he was Vanya, with Mama, with Papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with his toys and the coachman, with Nyanya, then with Katenka, with all the joys, sorrows, passions of childhood, boyhood, youth. Did Caius know the smell of the striped leather ball Vanya loved so much?: Did Caius kiss his mother's hand like that and did the silken folds of Caius's mother's dress rustle like that for him? Was Caius in love like that? Could Caius chair a session like that? And Caius is indeed mortal and it's right that he should die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my feelings and thoughts - for me it's quite different. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too horrible.
Leo Tolstoy
Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.
Leonid Andreyev
We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we're alive, we're all the same once we're dead. Just used-up shells.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky