Quotes About Russian

she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket. Carnegie Hall didn't know about it. It was just between you and Mary. It was a bit of a journey, but we would go back once or twice a month."* Friedman's mother was a Russian immigrant. She barely spoke English. But she had gone to work as a seamstress at the

In Russian folklore there is an archetype called yurodivy, or the "Holy Fool." The Holy Fool is a social misfit—eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy—who nonetheless has access to the truth. Nonetheless is actually the wrong word. The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.

Stalin knew that to get the Russian people to fight to the end with their backs to the wall, he needed something more than Marxist materialism. (...) What he did do was a characteristic Stalinist thing, he fetched the patriarch (of the Russian Orthodox Church) and one or two other prelates from the labour camp where they were languishing and brought them to the Kremlin and set them up in business again. It's one of those very significant incidents that tends to get forgotten.

Call me up as soon as you find time to come, or we can meet in Paris and have a talk. Next week almost every afternoon I'm posing for a Russian painter in Montparnasse.

The Russian novelist pulls his lush eyebrows together like the parts of a modular sofa.

also have a bad history with the self-checkout stations at my local Safeway grocery store. In my defense, the instructions for those things were obviously written by Russian spies as part of their plan to rip apart the fabric of our society.

In all my life I never met anyone so frivolous as you two, so crazy and unbusinesslike. I tell you in plain Russian your property is going to be sold and you don't seem to understand what I say.

The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think it's the thing we do best.

would strain credibility that such privileges would be awarded to an intelligence defector who had refused to cooperate with Russian authorities.

Sylvie heard her mama's voice in her head as if she were in the next chair. A real lady wears a cloth coat as if it were her best mink, and tosses her mink about as if it were cloth. If only she could be here now, see Sylvie's own Russian sable hanging in the anteroom. Mama, with her one good black coat, relined again and again over the years.

There was a poem with that mood by Pasternak: "Don't sleep, don't sleep, artist." It sounded better in Russian, because the word for "artist" had three syllables, it was an amphibrach, like "spaghetti," or "appendix." Don't sleep, don't sleep, gorilla, I thought as I went down the elevator to the subway platform.

German soldiers made use of Stalingrad orphans themselves. Daily tasks, such as filling water-bottles, were dangerous when Russian snipers lay in wait for any movement. So, for the promise of a crust of bread, they would get Russian boys and girls to take their water-bottles down to the Volga's edge to fill them. When the Soviet side realized what was happening, Red Army soldiers shot children on such missions.

American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it.

Chechens are not ethnically or culturally Russian, and have now been fighting for generations to free themselves from Russian rule.

You know, I grew up in the East part of Germany so we never had English in school, we had to learn Russian.

The Russian people and Russian culture are the linchpin, the glue that binds together this unique civilization.

Being sick is itself a kind of ressentiment. — Against this the invalid has only one great means of cure — I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without rebellion with which a Russian soldier for whom the campaign has become too much at last lies down in the snow.

Rolling my trousers down to expose the upper part of my buttocks and having a knife pressed up and down my spine by a Russian white witch, as she murmured incantations, was certainly a new experience to cure my backache. It was surprisingly soothing.

The withdrawal of more than half a million Russian troops and dependents from Germany since 1991 is described by historians as 'the biggest pullout ever by an army not defeated in battle.'

Contessa, a.k.a. Baboushka, was a leader in the Russian mafia. Hardnosed, ruthless... very much her own woman. She's a martial artist, marksman, and good with guns and gadgets as any good pulp spy should be. She's supported by her constant companion Gyorgy Gyorgyov, an old friend of her family who was, in fact, her KGB handler and inventor.

I dropped out of Oxford, and now I only speak Russian with the woman who gives me a bikini-wax. See what Hollywood does to you?

The decision, therefore, lies here in the East; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battle field and person by person, and made to bleed to death .

I was a Russian dancer in my elementary school production of 'Fiddler on the Roof' when I was in third grade or fourth grade. I was one of the younger kids accepted into the play, and the plays were pretty impressive, let me say.

I've never had a huge collection of records; I've never been a beat digga. I never been one of these guys who drives cross-country and knows some one-legged sailor who has a boat parked off some pier with a thousand Russian funk records that he stole from the Red Army in 1972.