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A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
Life itself today 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 an amalgam of reality and fantasy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
The moon ... is a mad woman holding up her dress So that her white belly shines. Haughty, Impregnable, Ridiculous, Silent and white as a debauched queen.
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. This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone. Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in Nietzsche's words, "the crutches of certainty". The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest. But that's absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number? Then how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions are infinite.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
It was clear: I was sick. I never used to dream. They say in the old days it was the most normal thing in the world to have dreams. Which makes sense: Their whole life was some kind of horrible merry-go-round of green, orange, Buddha, juice. But today we know that dreams point to a serious mental illness. And I know that up to now my brain has checked out chronometrically perfect, a mechanism without a speck of dust.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
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 have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
Literature is painting, architecture, and music.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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 -
Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
...what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about...
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken - errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter - even murder itself.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
Midsummer Night was roasting hot. The shore, of red granite, glowed with the heat; the dark blood of the earth seemed to be rising from below. There was a sharp, unbearable smell of birds, of cod, of green decaying seaweed. Through the mist the huge ruddy sun loomed nearer and nearer. And in the sea, dark blood welled up to meet it - in bloated, rearing, huge white waves. Night. The mouth of the bay between two cliffs was like a window. A window shutting out curious eyes with a white shade-white woolly fog. And all that you could see was that behind it something red was happening. (The North)
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me — and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, 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 a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath — and dying.
Yevgeny Zamyatin -
You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin