Quotes from Varlam Shalamov

Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friend.

Life repeats Shakespearian themes more often than we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale?

There is a much that a man should not see, should not know, and if he should see it, it is better for him to die.

We realized that life, even the worst of life, consists of an alternation of joys and sorrow, successes and failure more than the successes.

I remember the old northern legend of how God created the taiga while he was still a child. There were few colors, but they were childishly fresh and vivid, and their subjects were simple. Later, when God grew up and became an adult, he learned to cut out complicated patters from his pages and created many bright birds. God grew bored with his former child's world and he threw snow on his forest creation and went south forever.

A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good.

If bones could freeze, then the brain could also be dulled and the soul could freeze over. And the soul shuddered and froze- perhaps to remain frozen forever.

We realized that life, even the worst life, consists of an alternation of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and there was no need to fear the failures more than the successes.

I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

Nothing could be avoided, and nothing could be foreseen. What was the point of unnecessary fear?

Trees in the north die lying down – like people.

I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography. It was this awareness that gave me the will to live. I checked myself — frequently — and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.

Kolyma is Auschwitz without the ovens.

Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of 'difficult' conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends.

I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests. Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily.

We were disciplined and obedient to authority. We realized that truth and lies were twin sisters, and that truth on earth came in thousands of different forms.

Real friendship needed to have firm foundations laid before the conditions of everyday life had reached the extreme point beyond which human beings have nothing human about them except mistrust, anger, and lies.

Le poète se mourait depuis si longtemps qu'il avait cessé de comprendre que c'était la mort. Parfois, une idée simple et forte se frayait un chemin à travers son cerveau, douloureuse et presque palpable : qu'on lui avait volé le pain qu'il avait mis sous sa tête.

Literary fairy tales tell of 'difficult' conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough.

It was at this point that he realized that he felt no fear and that life had no value for him.

I'm dressed appropriate for the season mama, I'm dressed appropriately for the season.

That same sense of direction that animals possess perfectly also awakens in man under the right conditions.

There is a much that a man should not see, should not know, and if he should see it, it is better for him to die.

Only one group of people kept their humanity in the camps, the believers, whether Orthodox or sectarians.