Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 31

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
Vladimir Nabokov
I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake in the middle of the night and begin to realize, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.
M. Ageyev
There are far more reasons for death than there are for life.
Sergei Lukyanenko
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
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
Vladimir Nabokov
A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard. And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.
Leo Tolstoy
That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace
Mikhail Lermontov
I am leaving now; but know, Katerina Ivanovna, that you indeed love only him. And the more he insults you, the more you love him. That is your strain. You precisely love him as he is, you love him insulting you. If he reformed, you would drop him at once and stop loving him altogether. But you need him in order to continually contemplate your high deed of faithfulness, and to reproach him for his unfaithfulness. And it all comes from your pride. Oh, there is much humility and humiliation in it, but all of it comes from pride.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
His Majesty needs a can-I girl anyway. And I'm not it.""A can-I girl?" Andrea frowned. I leaned back. "'Can I fetch your food, Your Majesty? Can I tell you how strong and mighty you are, Your Majesty? Can I pick your fleas, Your Majesty? Can I kiss your ass, Your Majesty? Can I..." It dawned on me that Raphael was sitting very still. Frozen, like a statue, his gaze fixed on the point above my head. "He's standing behind me, isn't he?" Andrea nodded slowly."Technically it should be 'may I'," Curran said, his voice deeper than I remembered. "Since you're asking for permission." Why me? "To answer your question, yes, you may kiss my ass. Normally I prefer maintain my personal space, but you're a Friend of the Pack and your services have proven useful once or twice. I strive to accommodate the wishes of persons friendly to my people. My only question is, would kissing my ass be obeisance, grooming, or foreplay?
Ilona Andrews
They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.
Leo Tolstoy
If they're friends, then they've got your back . . . whether you're there or not. Friends won't "forget" about you.
Svetlana Chmakova
What is the basic difference between saying 'I know that God exists' and saying 'I know that love exists'?
Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh
And when there are no more classes, when society is socially democratized and unified, then there will be revealed in all its metaphysical depths the never-ending tragedy of the conflict between personality and society.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.
Vladimir L. Voeikov
She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.
Gary Shteyngart
If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.
Boris Pasternak
In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author — the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter.
Vladimir Nabokov
To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.
Lera Auerbach
Forgiving was the hardest thing. Sometimes forgiving was the hardest thing in the whole world.
Sergei Lukyanenko
I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.
Mikhail Lermontov
Nothing so removes a man from his inner, mysterious, real life, nothing makes him so deaf and dumb as the picture of these petty passions and petty crimes which calls itself the world of politics.
Vladimir Odoyevsky
When you know the destination, the path is easy.
Ratmir Timashev
Every reader can live One Thousand and One Lives; every fiction author can have One Thousand and One Masks, and their talent can have One Thousand and One Facets.
Lara Biyuts
You want me to go back into that house protected by a magic sticky note?”“Don’t even start,” I told him. “It’s working. If it weren’t working, you couldn’t drag me into that place.”“What did you write on here? ‘Don’t die’?”“No, I wrote, ‘Don’t be an a-hole!’” I headed for the house.“On yours or mine?”“On yours.”“Well, in that case, your magic isn’t working. I’m still an asshole.
Ilona Andrews
A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
Vladimir Nabokov
Like swimming riding writing or playing golf happiness can be learned.
Dr. Boris Sokoloff
There shall be no more death, Because we have already seen all that, Its old and we are tired of it, And now we need something new, And this new thing is Eternal Life
Boris Pasternak
And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.
Boris Pasternak
No matter what happens, you will always be Pack. Because you have that loyalty and restraint. Not human, not whatever, but Kate. Unique and different, but not separate.
Ilona Andrews
Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?
Leo Tolstoy
The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.
Leo Tolstoy
It's no good writing if God hasn't given you talent. People will just laugh.
Ivan Turgenev
Borkin: Ladies and gentlemen, why are you so glum? Sitting there like a jury after it's been sworn in! ... Let's think up something. What would you like? Forfeits, tug of war, catch, dancing, fireworks?
Anton Chekhov
As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
Vladimir Nabokov
in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Man is born in order to think (there he is, Kirill, finally!). Except that I don't believe that. I've never believed it, and I still don't believe it, and what man is born for -I have no idea. He's born, that's all. Scrapes by as best he can.
Boris Strugatsky
If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too
Vladimir Nabokov
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
...all this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us.
Nikolai Gogol
A complete atheist stands on the next-to-last upper step to the most complete faith (he may or may not take that step), while the indifferent one has no faith, apart from a bad fear.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with . . . For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants . . . but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being.
Leonid Borodin
An author who integrates alien signs into the medial surface of his own texts—signs behind which we presume the existence of other powerful, submedial subjects “as authors”—does not increase the comprehensibility of that text. Yet nonetheless, he increases the magical effectiveness this text exudes. Such quotations lead us to presume that the text houses a dangerous, manipulative subject, a magician with enough power to manipulate the signs of other powerful magicians and able to use them strategically for his own purposes. Thus an author who quotes alien signs conveys a stronger impression of powerful authorship than one who ad- vocates precisely his so-called own ideas—which do not interest anybody precisely because they are only his own. It is also well known that one may not quote the same author too often, in which case quoting gradu- ally looses its magical power and begins to irritate the reader. The reason for this gradual decrease of a quote’s magical effectiveness is that it looses its strangeness over time and gets integrated into the medial surface of a text, thereby becoming a proper part of it. In order to maintain their magical effect, quotes have to be exchanged constantly so as to continue to maintain the same appearance of foreignness and freshness. The quote functions as a magical fetish that lends the entire text a hidden, submedial power beyond its superficial meaning.
Boris Groys
Perhaps you'd like, you gentle fellow, To hear what I'm prepared to sayOn "kinfolk" and their implications?Well, here's my view of close relations:They're people whom we're bound to prize, To honor, love, and idolize,And following the old tradition,To visit come the Christmas feast, Or send a wish by mail at least;All other days they've our permission,To quite forget us if they please-So grant them, God, long life and ease!
Alexander Pushkin
Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of "good" and "evil" as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending on circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the killing of hundreds of thousands, could be good or could be bad. It all depends on class ideology. And who defines this ideology? The whole class cannot get together to pass judgment. A handful of people determine what is good and what is bad. But I must say that in this respect Communism has been most successful. It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil. Today, many people apart from the Communists are carried away by this idea.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can … Oh, but even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial—whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.
Anna Politkovskaya
Love them that hate you, but you can't love those you hate.
Leo Tolstoy
Someone once said that a minesweeper makes only two mistakes: the first is when he decides to be one. The second …
Vladislav Tamarov
I have a simple principle for the conduct of life - never to resist an adequate temptation.
Max Lerner
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
Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.
Vladimir Nabokov
Give me a few minutes.”“You have time.” He sat in the grass.“Are you just going to sit there and watch me?”“Yes. Watching pretty peasant girls is what we poor little rich boys do best.”“Peasant?”He shrugged. “You started the name calling.
Ilona Andrews
Of course, to avoid getting stuck in that convo with someone you dislike or feel uncomfortable around, don't be passive, be proactive. Do not let them direct your interaction on their terms, do it on yours. Ask a Misdirection Question--something too difficult to answer quickly--e.g., 'What's Congress up to?' or 'You ever learn any cool science?' When you ask the question, don't make eye contact, keep moving and get out of there. Do not wait for a response and deny ever asking it. Repeat these actions until you are never again spoken to by that individual (about four times).
Eugene Mirman
When you live next to death ... you don't think about it anymore, you just try to encounter it as seldom as possible.
Vladislav Tamarov
A percentage! What splendid words they have; they are so scientific, so consolatory.... Once you've said 'percentage' there's nothing more to worry about. If we had any other word... maybe we might feel more uneasy....
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy -- is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky