242 Quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

And tomorrow... what? Nobody knows. You understand? Neither I nor anyone else knows. It’s unknown. You understand it’s come to an end, everything that was known? Now it’ll be new, never before seen or imagined.

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity – but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.

It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come today.

I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, all lips. Some are pink and firmly round: a ring, a tender guardrail from the whole world. And then there are these ones: a second ago they weren’t here, and just now – like a knife-slit – they are here, still dripping sweet blood.

What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they’d nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.

The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional – and not some other kind of reality.

How awful for you! By the looks of it, you’ve developed a soul.

Then you love it. For if you fear it because it is stronger than you, hate it because you fear it, you love it. For you cannot subject it to yourself. One loves only the things one cannot conquer.

The ancient God created the old man, capable of erring – thus he erred himself.