24 Quotes by Ilya Ehrenburg

We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism – a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair.

A pity we hadn’t had time to say all the things we wanted to each other.

It is difficult to uproot fully grown plants; they become diseased and often perish. In Russia now they practise winter transplanting: a tree is dug up while it is in a dormant condition. In spring it comes back to life in a new place. A good method, especially as a tree has no memory.

Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general’s house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.

I left with a heavy heart and a still heavier suitcase – I had filled it with my favourite books.

In peaceful times in a peaceful country a man grows up, goes to school, marries, works, suffers illnesses, grows old. He may go through the whole of life without understanding what freedom is. No doubt he always feels free to the extent to which it is proper for a respectable citizen with average powers of imagination to be free.