Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Fog.. So very..Do you like fogShe used the ancient, long-forgotten thou — the thou of the master to the slave. It entered into me slowly, sharply. Yes, I was a slave, and this, too, was necessary, ...”

“The two inhabitants of Paradise were given the opportunity to choose: happiness without freedom or freedom without happiness; tertium non datur. And they, donkeys, chose freedom: so what? You under...”

“Ask point blank: What is revolution? Some people will answer, paraphrasing Louis XIV: We are the revolution. Others will answer by the calendar, naming the month and the day. Still others will give...”

“The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the birth of new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, ice blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turn...”

“When the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma—a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatization in science, religion, ...”

“A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday's clock, nor by today's but by tomorrow's. It is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms s...”

“What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons — horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless Why? and What next? Th...”

“It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mist...”

“If there were anything fixed in nature, if there were truths, all of this would, of course, be wrong. But fortunately, all truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process:...”

“The formal character of a living literature is the same as its inner character: it denies verities; it denies what everyone knows and what I have known until this moment. It departs from the canoni...”

“The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity — but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held befo...”

“Science and art both project the world along certain coordinates. Differences in form are due only to differences in the coordinates. All realistic forms are projections along the fixed, plane coor...”

“A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable. Euclid's world is very simple, and Eins...”

“There were a lot of utopias in the nineteenth century, wonderful societies that we might possibly construct. Those went pretty much out of fashion after World War I. And almost immediately one of t...”

“Zamyatin adds to our understanding of the form for forcing contradiction into outright paradox. We is clearly anti-utopian, but it is also very different from Wells's work in the way it generates a...”