Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 9

I have just awoken, having dreamed of music. The final chord fades away within me while I try to focus on individuals amid the living, breathing mass packed into this vast waiting room, in this mixture of sleep and weariness.
Andreï Makine
And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
How can it not exist? What does that—” A tiny grey body shot in front of the Land Rover. “Squirrel!”Mad Rogan swerved to the side, trying to avoid the suicidal beast. The SUV hit a curb and jumped. For a terrifying second, we almost flew, weightless. My heart leaped into my throat. The heavy vehicle landed back on the pavement with a thud. The squirrel leapt into the grass on the other side.I remembered to breathe. “Thank you for not killing the squirrel.”“You’re welcome, although now I want to go back and strangle it.
Ilona Andrews
MASHA. Just think, I am already beginning to forget her face. People will not remember us either. They will forget.VERSHININ. Yes. They will forget. That is our fate, you can't do anything about it. The things which to us seem serious, significant, very important, - the time will come - they will be forgotten or they will seem of no consequence.
Anton Chekhov
Literary style is like crystal-ware: the cleaner the wineglass, the brighter the brilliance. As a reader, I agree with those who believe that a colour of the dress, which a character has on, as well as any enumeration and description of dishes at dinner or in the kitchen should be mentioned only in case if all this has a strong consequent relation to the plot, but as an author, I can’t help mentioning all this, with no particular reason, just for love for my characters, desiring to give them something nice and pleasant. Melancholy grows a platinum rose. Affection grows a double rose.
Lara Biyuts
The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
Leo Tolstoy
...everything defiled and degraded. What cannot man live through! Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[S]urely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination.
Vladimir Nabokov
The closest to my heart is not just one book - it’s the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, “Gods’ Food,” is already available in English.
Sahara Sanders
It always turns out this way: at first people idolize you, swear to be your faithful friend forever and then spit in your tea and in your soul, too.
Igor Eliseev
the drama below and the drama above could easily collide at any moment
Ana Chapman
I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God’s shrine
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Author's PrayerIf I speak for the dead, I mustleave this animal of my body,I must write the same poem over and overfor the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.If I speak of them, I must walkon the edge of myself, I must live as a blind manwho runs through the rooms withouttouching the furniture.Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What yearis it?"I can dance in my sleep and laughin front of the mirror.Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,I will praise your madness, andin a language not mine, speakof music that wakes us, musicin which we move. For whatever I sayis a kind of petition and the darkest daysmust I praise.
Ilya Kaminsky
Plunged up to the ears in work, good friend!" thought Oblomov as he watched him depart. "Yes, and blind and deaf and dumb to everything else in the world! Yet by going into society and, at the same time, busying yourself about your affairs you will yet win distinction and promotion. Such is what they call 'a career'! Yet of how little use is a man like that! His intellect, his will, his feelings--what do they avail him? So many luxuries is what they are--nothing more.Such an individual lives out his little span without achieving a single thing worth mentioning; and meanwhile he works in an office from morning till night--yes, from morning till night, poor wretch!
Ivan Goncharov
Atheism ... goes back to the Ancient Greek (a — a negative prefix, theos — god), evidencing the antiquity of the outlook of those who saw no presence of God (or gods) in their everyday lives, or who even denied the very existence of God (or gods). There are different types of atheism, but atheism in one form or another has existed in every civilization.[T]he concept "atheist" partially coincides with such notions as "skeptic," "agnostic," and "rationalist" and it borders with such notions as "anticlerical," "God fighter" (theomachist), and "God abuser" (blasphemer).It is wrong to identify an atheist as one who denies God, though this is what opponents of atheism usually claim. If such people exist, it would probably be more correct to call them the "verbal" murderers of God, for the prefix a- means denying as elimination. ... I would like to stress that the prefix a- does not necessarily mean rejection. It can mean "absence of." For example, "apathy" means "absence of passion." Thus, the concept "atheist" does not necessarily mean nihilism.
Valerii A. Kuvakin
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Leo Tolstoy
She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.
Vladimir Nabokov
The nights were long, like the braids of a pretty girl, and the days were short, like a girl's sense. ("The North")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Although I think the word "pleasure" is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion
Olga Goa
What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues-innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for affection-are our sole objects of pursuit?
Leo Tolstoy
I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead.
Mikhail Bulgakov
In the monotony of everyday existence grief comes as a holiday, and a fire is an entertainment. A scratch embellishes an empty face.
Maxim Gorky
Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.
Konstantin Stanislavski
The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the part of anarchists and semianarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right to an inactive hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself the immediate task of overthrowing the existing regime.
Leon Trotsky
The village schoolmaster took us for instructive walks ('what you hear is the sound of a scythe being sharpened' ; 'that field there will be given a rest next season ';'oh, just a small bird...no special name '; 'if that peasant is drunk, it is because he is poor ') 71
Vladimir Nabokov
This struggle of people against their conditions this is where you find the meaning in life.
Rose Chernin
Some say God is living there [in space]. I was looking around very attentively, but I did not see anyone there. I did not detect either angels or gods....I don't believe in God. I believe in man - his strength, his possibilities, his reason.
Gherman Titov
Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Aging is tedious, but it is the only way to live long.
Faina Ranevskaya
Men show their superiority inside animals outside.
Russian proverb
Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I don't want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted - and not just towards cats and dogs.
Vasily Grossman
The soul is healed by being with children.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats your own.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.''But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...''Life won't leave one alone as it is.
Leo Tolstoy
How well she does everything! She reads not as if reading were the highest human activity, but as if it were the simplest possible thing, a thing even animals could do. As if she were carrying water from a well, or peeling potatoes."These reflections calmed him. A rare peace descended upon his soul. His mind stopped darting from subject to subject. He could not help smiling...
Boris Pasternak
He was, however, unable to give much prolonged or continuous thought to anything that evening , or to concentrate on any one idea; and anyway, even if he had been able to, he would not have found his way to a solution of these questions in a conscious manner; now he could only feel. In place of dialectics life had arrived, and in his consciousness something of a wholly different nature must now work towards fruition.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Thought isn't a form of energy. So how on Earth can it change material processes? That question has still not been answered.
Vladimir I. Vernadsky
He longed to revenge himself on everyone for his own unseemliness
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.
Vladislav Tamarov
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
The thoughts of a prisoner—they're not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck in the dispensary that evening? Would they out Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on that warm vest?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
Garry Kasparov
We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.
Leo Tolstoy
Life seemed to him to be a narrow cage, and her iron bars were many and dense, and there was only one way out.
Leonid Andreyev
But why?" Vimbai whispered, overwhelmed with the weight of accumulated disbelief. "What is happening to us?""Who knows?" Maya shrugged. "Who cares? Enjoy it while you can, why don't you? There will be tons of boring shit in your life, okay? I promise.
Ekaterina Sedia
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")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Just imagine the existence of a man - let us call him A - who has left youth far behind, and of a woman whom we may call B, who is young and happy and has seen nothing as yet of life or of the world. Family circumstances of various kinds brought them together, and he grew to love her as a daughter, and had no fear that his love would change its nature. But he forgot that B was so young, that life was still a May-game to her and that it was easy to fall in love with her in a different way, and that this would amuse her. He made a mistake and was suddenly aware of another feeling, as heavy as remorse, making its way into his heart, and he was afraid. He was afraid that their old friendly relations would be destroyed, and he made up his mind to go away before that happened.
Leo Tolstoy
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.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
And not only the pride of intellect, but the stupidity of intellect. And, above all, the dishonesty, yes, the dishonesty of intellect. Yes, indeed, the dishonesty and trickery of intellect.
Leo Tolstoy
Listen! This is where it began but I keep getting muddled... The fact of the matter is that I now want to recall everything, every trifle, every little detail. I still want to collect my thoughts and - I can't, and now there are these little details, these little details...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We are shocked by thieves taking pride in their clever touch, prostitutes in their depravity and murderers in their callousness. But it is shocking only because the atmosphere of the circles they move in is restricted, and - what matters most - we are on the outside. But isn't the same thing happening when rich men take pride in their wealth (which is theft), military commanders in their victories (which are murder) and rulers in their power (which is violence)? We do not see them as people who corrupt the concept of life, or good and evil, in order to justify their own situation, but only because the circles of people who share these corrupt concepts are wider, and we belong to them.
Leo Tolstoy
If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too
Vladimir Nabokov
Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
Gary Shteyngart
The East is unfamiliar with those confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies so beloved in the West. There is a clear difference in tonality. One's gaze never lingers on the suffering humanity of Christ, but penetrates behind the kenotic veil. To the West's mysticism of the Cross and its veneration of the Sacred Heart corresponds the eastern mysticism of the sealed tomb, from which eternal life eternal wells up.
Paul Evdokimov
You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her". #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion:
Olga Goa