Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

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 infinity… The unifs of passersby brushed against me, but I walked alone. I saw it clearly: everyone was saved, but there was no salvation for me. I did not want salvation …"(c)

Let my notes, like the most sensitive seismograph, record the curve of even the most insignificant vibrations of my brain: for it is precisely such vibrations that are sometimes the forewarning of...

The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.

And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.

Do you believe that you will die? Yes man is mortal I am a man ergo... no that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I am asking is, have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind but with your body? Actually felt that one the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be icy and yellow? No, of course you don't believe it. Which is the reason why up until now you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement.

And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.

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 quick splash of cold water, logic. I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist. Well, of course, it's clear that you can't establish a function without taking into account what its limit is. And it's also clear that what I felt yesterday, that stupid "dissolving in the universe," if you take it to its limit, is death. Because that's exactly what death is - the fullest possible dissolving of myself into the universe. Hence, if we let L stand for love and D for death, then L = f (D), i.e., love and death...

You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.

The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")

They say there is a kind of flower that blooms only once a century, Then couldn't there be one that flowers only once every thousand years - or once every ten thousand years? Maybe there are and we just don't know it because today is itself that once-in-a-thousand-year moment.

The only reason I'm writing this down is to show how human reason, even very sharp and exact human reason, can get crazily confused and thrown off the track.

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

But a thought swarmed in me; what if he, this yellow-eyed being – in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life – is happier than us?

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