Quotes from Yevgeny Zamyatin

You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.

And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative...

I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

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.

Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter - even murder itself.

knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

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.

We comes from God, I from the Devil.

All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. ("Tomorrow")

The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going.

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

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.

Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.

The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.

And happiness...Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one...What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign — the divine minus.

The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. ("A Story About The Most Important Thing")

The moon, our own, earthly moon is bitterly lonely, because it is alone in the sky, always alone, and there is no one to turn to, no one to turn to it. All it can do is ache across the weightless airy ice, across thousands of versts, toward those who are equally lonely on earth, and listen to the endless howling of dogs. ("A Story About The Most Important Thing")

What is it to you if I don't want others to want for me, if I want to want myself — if I want the impossible...