Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 7

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school.She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
And in the depths of music, I didn’t find the answer,And again there was silence, and again the ghost of summer.
Anna Akhmatova
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt it in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.
Leo Tolstoy
you talk so much, I don't know when to pay attention
Dmitry Dyatlov
I know: yes, no, even I must tear offThe delicate daisy petals.Everyone on earth is destined to feelThe torments of love.
Anna Akhmatova
Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand. I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
Leo Tolstoy
Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
Vladimir Lenin
The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.
Leo Tolstoy
I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon; so I say let me play the buffoon, for you are, every one of you, stupider and lower than I." He longed to revenge himself on every one for his own unseemliness. He suddenly recalled how he had once in the past been asked, "Why do you hate so and so, so much?" And he had answered them, with his shameless impudence, "I'll tell you. He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself.
G.I. Gurdjieff
He had the prettiest hair she had ever seen on a man: dark brown, almost black, and soft like sable, it fell down to his shoulders. She wondered what he'd do if she threw some mud in it. Probably kill her.
Ilona Andrews
And this is the only immortality you and i may share, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
Sometimes it feels like you and I are at the movie theater, sitting next to each other and watching the same movie. People say something, argue incessantly, even fight, but this is all somewhere far away, on the other side of the screen, and we are just passive onlookers unable to affect the course of events.
Igor Eliseev
She stood in awe of her elder daughter. Lida was never tender, she spoke only about serious things; she lived her own separate life and for her mother and sister was as sacred and slightly mysterious a personage as an admiral who always remains in his cabin is for his sailors.- The House with the Mezzanine
Anton Chekhov
Why was is that the Light acted through lies, and the Darkness acted though the truth? Why was is that our truth proved powerless, but lies were effective? And why was the Darkness able to manage perfectly well with truth in order to do Evil?
Sergei Lukyanenko
He was nine years old; he was a child; he he knew his own soul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love he let no one into his soul.
Leo Tolstoy
Dumnezeu este doar unul şi acelaşi pretutindeni.
Leo Tolstoy
Beauty works perfect miracles. All inner shortcomings in a beauty, instead of causing repugnance, become somehow extraordinarily attractive; vice itself breathes comeliness in them; but if it were to disappear, then a woman would have to be twenty times more intelligent than a man in order to inspire, if not love, at least respect.
Nikolai Gogol
He who has lived and thought can neverHelp in his soul despising men,He who has felt will be foreverHaunted by days he can’t regain.For him there are no more enchantments,Him does the serpent of remembrance,Him does repentance always gnaw.All this will frequently affordA great delight to conversations.
Alexander Pushkin
...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.
Nikolai Gogol
Anything is better than lies and deceit!
Leo Tolstoy
Torch strode over and stared at the fiver"What's this?""Some change for you. Buy your flunkies some decent clothes." I dipped my fingers into the jar and smeared think fragrant paste on my face. Torch frowned, mirroring the expression on my aunt's face."Change?"Oh, for crying out loud. "It's money. We don't use coins as currency now, we use paper money." He stared at me. "I'm insulting you! I'm saying your poor, like a beggar, because your undead are in rags. I'm offering to clothe your servants for you, because you can't provide for them. Come on, how thick do you have to be?"He jerked his hand up. A jet of flame erupted from his fingers, sliding against the ward. I jerked back from the windows on instinct. The fire died. I leaned forward. "Do you understand now?" More fire. "What's the matter? Was that not enough money?
Ilona Andrews
Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.
Vladimir Lenin
And yet I shall try again: "they are murdering me!"--all right, all together once more: "they are murdering me!" and again: "murdering"... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair--but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me.
Vladimir Nabokov
To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.
Leo Tolstoy
Every kingdom has three pillars: Poet, Sword and Law.
Lara Biyuts
Art is not an end in itself but a means of addressing humanity.
M. P. Moussorgsky
God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children.
Ivan Turgenev
Now life is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that's the basis of the whole deception. Now man is still not what he should be. There will e a new man, happy and proud. Whoever doesn't care whether he lives or doesn't live, he himself will be God. And that other God will no longer be.''So, that other God does exist, in your opinion?''He doesn't exist, but he does exist. In the stone there' no pain, but in the fear of the stone there is pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Nezhdanov's heart began to beat violently and he lowered his eyes involuntarily. This girl, who had fallen in love with a homeless wretch like him, who trusted him, who was ready to follow him, to go with him towards one and the same goal — this wonderful girl — Marianna — at that moment was, for Nezhdanov, the embodiment of everything good and just on earth; the embodiment of that love, that of a family, sister or wife, which he had not experienced; the embodiment of homeland, happiness, struggle and freedom.
Ivan Turgenev
In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden-the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When you were a child, you used to run to me for protection. Now, in moments of weakness, I want to hide my head on your knees; I want you to be strong and wise; I want you to protect and defend me. I'm not always strong in spirit, Vitya – I can be weak too. I often think about suicide, but something holds me back – some weakness, or strength, or irrational hope.
Vasily Grossman
Rostov kept thinking about that brilliant feat of his, which, to his surprise, had gained him the St. George Cross and even given him the reputation of a brave man - and there was something in it that he was unable to understand. "So they're even more afraid than we are!" he thought. "So that's all there is to so-called heroism? And did I really do it for the fatherland? And what harm had he done, with his dimple and his light blue eyes? But how frightened he was! He thought I'd kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand faltered. And they gave me the St. George Cross. I understand nothing, nothing!
Leo Tolstoy
Or again, take your red banner. You think it's a flag, isn't that what you think? Well, it isn't a flag. It's the purple kerchief of the death woman, she uses it for luring. And why for luring? She waves it and she nods and winks and lures young men to come and be killed, then she sends famine and plague. That's what it is. And you went and believed her. You thought it was a flag. You thought it was: "Come to me, all ye poor and proletarians of the world.
Boris Pasternak
Some pray to marry the man they love My prayer will somewhat vary: I humbly pray to Heaven above That I love the man I marry.
Rose Pastor Stokes
It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.
Leo Tolstoy
If you want to understand democracy spend less time in the library with Plato and more time in the buses with people.
Simeon Strunsky
Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.
Vladimir Nabokov
It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You should have long since gotten rid of military-industrial complexes.
Arkady Strugatsky
You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Don't buy the house buy the neighborhood.
Russian proverb
So crosses don't do anything against your kind?" Sean asked."No," Arland said. "There is no mystical force repelling us.""Then why?""We're forbidden to kill a creature in a moment of prayer or invocation of their deity. Well, we can, technically, but you have to do penance and purify yourself and nobody wants to spend weeks praying and bathing themselves in the sacred cave springs. The water's only a fraction warmer than ice. When one of you holds up a cross, it's difficult to determine whether you're praying, invoking, or just waving it around. So the sane strategy is to back away.
Ilona Andrews
truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
Leo Tolstoy
If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When you don't know what you're living for, you don't care how you live from one day to the next. You're happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep you bury the tedious question of what you lived for that day and what you're going to live for tomorrow.
Ivan Goncharov
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man.
Anton Chekhov
My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.
Gary Shteyngart
They suffer, of course... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down.
Leo Tolstoy
Existence is tedious, anyway.
Anton Chekhov
Carelessness on the part of revolutionaries has always been the best aid the police have.
Victor Serge
Try and set yourself the task not to think of a white bear, and the cursed thing comes to mind every minute.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Spring, love, happiness! Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and always a fraud! There is no spring, no sun, no happiness!
Leo Tolstoy
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Vladimir Nabokov
O masses, o masses! When will you assume the image and likeness of your avant-garde?
Andrei Platonov
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
Leo Tolstoy