Quotes from Yevgeny Zamyatin

He plashed away, like paddles on water, toward the door, and every step he made returned to me gradually my feet, my hands, my fingers. My soul again spread equally throughout my body. I was able to breathe.

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

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.

O-90 sat over the notebook, her head leaning toward her left shoulder, and making such an effort that her tongue was pushing her left cheek out. She looked like such a child, so charming. And so I felt good all over, clear, simple...

The only reason I'm writing this down is to show how human reason, even very sharp and exact human reason, can get crazily confused and thrown off the track.

And I learned from my own experience that laughter was the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything.

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.

The moon hangs alien, heavy, like a lock on a door; the door is tightly shut. ("The North")

I must note here that even among us the process of the hardening, the crystallization of life has evidently not been completed; there are still some steps to be ascended before we reach the ideal. The ideal (clearly) is the condition where nothing happens any more.

I told you, we must cut out imagination. In everyone...Extirpate imagination. Nothing but surgery, nothing but surgery will do!

Ai bi?t ???c...Ng??i ta cÅ©ng gi?ng nhÆ° má»™t cu?n ti?u thuy?t: chÆ°a ??n trang cu?i thì chÆ°a bi?t k?t c?c s? ra sao. B?ng không thì Ä'âu Ä'áng ?? ??c...

Now... what I feel these in my brain is just like... some kind of foreign body... like having a very thin little eyelash in your eye. You feel generally okay, but that eye with the last in it-you can't get it off your mind for a second.

How do you know nonsense isn't a good thing? if human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily previous could have come from it.

I felt I hadn't breathed since early morning, that my heart had not beat-and only now for the first time I took a breath, only now the floodgates in my chest opened...

If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the power of words.

Shutting my eyes, I dreamed in formulas.

Do you believe that you will die? Yes man is mortal I am a man ergo... no that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I am asking is, have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind but with your body? Actually felt that one the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be icy and yellow? No, of course you don't believe it. Which is the reason why up until now you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement.

that ancient legend about paradise ... Why, it's about us, about today. Yes! Just think. Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom, and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they longed for the chains.

Dicen que hay unas flores que sólo se abren y florecen cada cien años. Y ¿por qué no han de haber otras que florezcan una vez cada mil e incluso cada diez mil años? Quizá no lo hayamos sabido por la simple razón de que este «una vez cada mil años» acontece precisamente hoy.

If you try to follow the language of thought in your own mind, you will not find even the simplest sentences- only shreds, fragments of sentences, scattered as after an explosion, have greater effect on the reader than the same thoughts and images arranged in regular, steady, marching ranks?...because you meet the reader's natural instinctive need. You do not compel him to skim

Great Benefactor! How absurd- to want pain! Can there be anyone who doesn't know that pain is a negative quality, and that if you add them up it reduces the sum we call happiness? so it follows... But...nothing follows. The slate is clean. Naked.

if the speed of an aero equals zero, the aero is motionless; if human liberty is equal to zero, man does not commit any crime. That is clear. The way to rid man of criminality is to rid him of freedom.

But the sky! The sky is blue. Its limpidness is not marred by a single cloud. (How primitive was the taste of the ancients, since their poets were always inspired by these senseless, formless, stupidly rushing accumulations of vapor!)

Besides, I can't, I no longer have the strength to destroy this painful piece of myself, which might turn out to be the piece I value most.