YEVGENY ZAMYATIN QUOTES III

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

Tags: death


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

Tags: lawyers


Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

Islanders and the Fisher of Men

Tags: morality


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

Tags: nonsense


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

Tags: tomorrow


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


Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

We

Tags: children


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


All women are lips, nothing but lips.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

We

Tags: lips


The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

We

Tags: logic


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


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


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

Tags: freedom


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


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


The purpose of art, including literature, is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

The Goal


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

Tags: autumn


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

Tags: Anton Chekhov


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


We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today; we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow -- and judge today in the name of tomorrow.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

Tomorrow