Russian Author Quotes

My mother, who disliked me from the bottom of her heart, deliberately did everything, it seemed, that would strengthen and intensify my unbounded passion for freedom and a military life. She wouldn't let me walk in the garden. She wouldn't let me be away from her for even half an hour: I had to sit in her bedroom and make lace. She herself taught me to sew, to knit, and seeing that I had neither the desire nor the ability for this sort of work, that in my hands everything tore or broke, she became angry, lost control of herself, and beat me very painfully on the hands.

Nadezhda Durova

Vegetarianism is necessary for the very rich and the very poor. The poor need it because it is cheap and nourishing. The rich, in order to cleanse all the poisons from the corpses that have accumulated in their overfed organism.

Natalia Nordman

The age is rocking the wave
with human grief
to a golden beat, and an adder
is breathing in time with it in the grass.

Osip Mandelstam

In Russia, people suffer from the stillness of time.

Tatyana Tolstaya

Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise; And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.

Vladimir Nabokov

The past is good (as we all know), twenty, thirty years back everything was good, anyone can tell you that.

'The Don! The Don! The gentle Don! Our father; giver of our food! Hurrah!'

Mikhail Sholokhov

There shall be wings!...if the accomplishment be not for me, tis for some other. It shall be done. The spirit cannot lie; and Man, who shall know all and who shall have wings, shall indeed be as a god.

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that's true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don't change.

Our planet
is poorly equipped
for delight.
One must snatch
gladness
from the days that are.
In this life
it's not difficult to die.
To make life
is more difficult by far.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Humanity has no force more powerful and victorious than science.

Many men are like unto sausages: whatever you stuff them with, that they will bear in them.

Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy

Men are always murderers, and their calmness and generosity is the calmness of a well-fed animal, that knows itself out of danger.

Leonid Andreyev

"Which is more useful, the Sun or the Moon?" asks Kuzma Prutkov, the renowned Russian philosopher, and after some reflection he answers himself: "The Moon is the more useful, since it gives us its light during the night, when it is dark, whereas the Sun shines only in the daytime, when it is light anyway."

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Frossia's husband had the ability to feel the voltage of an electric current like a personal emotion. He animated everything that his hands or mind touched, so he really understood the flow of forces in any piece of mechanism and could actually feel the painful, patient resistance of the metal body of a machine.

Andrei Platonov

There are no more fortunate and happy people than those who live according to the correct, eternal laws of the multiplication table.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Of Soviet Government:

But the exchange of thoughts and ideas is not silence, is it? The state considers that uncontrolled information must not be disseminated either at home or abroad. If you read uncensored work, then you have to be prepared to pay the price of imprisonment.

Irina Ratushinskaya