Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

“Literature is painting, architecture, and music.”

“We need writers who fear nothing.”

“If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.”

“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 mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.”

“There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.”

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

“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.”

“Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children. So you're right, it's a child's question, just as it should be.”

“Everything used to revolve around the sun; now I knew it all revolved around me – slowly, blissfully, squinting its eyes.”

“Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.”

“Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter – even murder itself.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“The government (or humanity) would not permit capital punishment for one man, but they permitted the murder of millions a little at a time.”

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

“The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her tongue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts – at any rate not the reverse.”

“The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.”

“There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.”

“Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative...”

“What is strangest of all, most unnatural of all, is that the finger hasn't got the slightest desire to be on the hand, to be with the others.”

“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.”

“You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.”