Quotes from zamyatin yevgeny

To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.

Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.

Ever since he repented of religion and shaved off his clerical beard and mustache, he has had the constant feeling that he has taken off his trousers, and that his nose protrudes altogether indecently and must at all cost be covered.

All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.

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.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed.

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.

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.

Isn't it clear that bliss and envy--they are the numerator and the denominator of the fraction known as happiness.

It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see?

An error is more useful than truth: truth is a thought suffering from arteriosclerosis.

The sole means of ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom.

I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.

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

And Homo sapiens only then becomes man in the complete sense of the word, when his punctuation includes no question marks, only exclamation points, commas, and periods. And you, being children, may swallow without crying all the bitter things I am to give you only if they be coated with the syrup of adventures.

Beauty? Why is the dance beautiful? Answer: Because this is a non-free movement, because the whole deep meaning of dance is in absolute, aesthetic subordination, ideal unfreedom.