Quotes from Yevgeny Zamyatin

She was like a candle that just went out. All the circles that made her up suddenly got lopsided and warped.

The phono-lecturer began the description of the recently invented musicometer. "… By merely rotating this handle anyone is enabled to produce about three sonatas per hour. What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

Who knows who you really are? A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don't know how it's going to end. Otherwise, there'd be no point in reading....

I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, nothing but lips. Some are pink, supple, round-a right, a tender shield against the whole world. And then these: A second ago they didn't exist, and now suddenly, made by a knife, the sweet blood still dripping...

Well, fallen angel. Now you're quite ruined," she said, reverting to the formal you. "No, aren't you afraid? Well, goodbye! You'll get back on your own, right?

They say there is a kind of flower that blooms only once a century, Then couldn't there be one that flowers only once every thousand years - or once every ten thousand years? Maybe there are and we just don't know it because today is itself that once-in-a-thousand-year moment.

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals...

Was it not I who populated with them all these pages—just recently no more than white rectangular deserts? Without me, would they ever be seen by those whom I shall lead behind me along the narrow paths of lines?

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?' ("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

During the first firing a dozen or so numbers from the dock neglected to get out of the way - nothing remained of them except some crumbs and soot.

when man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom. And now, just as we have gotten rid of it (on the cosmic scale, centuries are, of course, no more than "just"), some wretched halfwits...

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. . . . But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

And that was when I learned from my own experience that a laugh can be a terrifying weapon. With a laugh you can kill even murder itself.

Our gods are here, below, with us---in the office, the kitchen, the workshop, the toilet; the gods have become like us. Ergo, we have become as gods.

All women are lips, nothing but lips. Some pink, firmly round---a ring, a tender protection against the whole world. But these: a second ago they did not exist, and now--a knife slit--and the sweet blood will drip down.

And how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.

The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.

I bent down to I-330 and drank her in with my eyes for the last time.

And how about the "Daily Odes to the Benefactor"? Who can read them without bowing his head reverently before the selfless labor of this Number of Numbers? Or the terrible blood-red beauty of the "Flowers of Judicial Verdicts"? Or the immortal tragedy, "Lat for Work"? Or the bedside book of "Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene"?

It was a remarkable intersection of thoughts. She said almost in the same words the things I had written down before the walk! Do you understand? Even the thoughts! It is because nobody is one, but one of. We are all so much alike—

It's clear: if there is no good reason for enviousness, the denominator of the fraction of happiness is brought to zero and the fraction is transformed into a glorious infinity.

Imagine yourself standing on a shore: waves rhythmically rising, rising, and then suddenly they stay there, they set, they freeze.