Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 wi...”

“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.”

“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 se...”

“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 hap...”

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

“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 qui...”

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

“I 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...”

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

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

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

“Literature is painting, architecture, and music.”

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

“The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.”

“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 werent...”

“You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.”

“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.”