Russian author (1884-1937)
This is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, and 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 for a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath--and dying.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
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 wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Islanders and the Fisher of Men
How do you know that nonsense isn't a good thing? If human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily precious could have come from it.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Nobody heard the deacon cry as he swung the cleaver. Everyone from eighteen to fifty was busy with the peaceful revolutionary work of preparing supper.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
The myth about the angel who rebelled against his Lord is the most beautiful of all myths, the proudest, the most revolutionary, the most immortal of them all.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Day and the Age
Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Islanders and the Fisher of Men
All women are lips, nothing but lips.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity -- but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
A Soviet Heretic
Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
And tomorrow--who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don't know and no one knows--it's all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
By complex ways, by looking deep into the dark well of the human soul, full of filth, somewhere at the very bottom of it Chekhov at last found his faith. And this faith turned out to be faith in man, in the power of human progress. And man became his god.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Chekhov
I've read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom -- that is, in disorganized wildness.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
The purpose of art, including literature, is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Goal
Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters
You can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We