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.”

“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...”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“It 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.”

“We comes from God, I from the Devil.”

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

“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.”

“knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith”

“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.”

“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.”

“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...”