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If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?".
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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 -
Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
There are two generic and invariable features that characterize utopias. One is the content: the authors of utopias paint what they consider to be ideal societies; translating this into the language of mathematics, we might say that utopias bear a + sign. The other feature, organically growing out of the content, is to be found in the form: a utopia is always static; it is always descriptive and has no, of almost no, plot dynamics.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.... But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
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 -
O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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And why do you think that foolishness is bad? If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
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 -
Now 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 -
I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
In order to write about the machine you have to know it, to live with it, to love it (or hate it). I think that true writing could be done on industrial subjects by people who work in industry, who are firmly linked with it. But ... and here is the opposite 'but', the technology of literary craftsmanship is itself a very fine and complex matter. Qualified specialists from industry prove themselves dilettantes in the field of literature. The needed synthesis is not yet in sight.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.
Yevgeny Zamyatin