119 Quotes by Vasily Grossman

In the blank wall of the world’s indifference there had appeared a tiny snakelike fissure.

What Mostovskoy found most sinister of all was that National Socialism seemed so at home in the camp: rather than peering haughtily at the common people through a monocle, it talked and joked in their own language. It was down-to-earth and plebeian. And it had an excellent knowledge of the mind, language and soul of those it deprived of freedom.

I had been imagining what war was like – everything on fire, children crying, cats running about, and when we got to Stalingrad it really turned out to be like that, only more terrible.

There is one right even more important than the right to send men to their deaths without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death.

A soft, gentle light fell on the forest-floor, diffused by a screen of foliage. The air itself was thick and congealed; a fighter-pilot, accustomed to a rushing wind, felt this very acutely.

For a particular scene to enter into a person and become a part of their soul, it is evidently not enough that the scene be beautiful. The person also has to have something clear and beautiful present inside them.

Stalin’s hatred for the Old Bolsheviks who opposed him was also a hatred for those aspects of Lenin’s character that contradicted what was most essential in Lenin.

What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.

If Fascism should ever be fully assured of it’s final triumph, the world will choke in blood.