Lyudmila Ulitskaya Quotes

When I was young I believed people should be told everything and that, as a pastor, I had a duty to share all my knowledge. Over the years I came to see that was a mistake. A person may know only what they are capable of assimilating. I have been thinking about this for half my life, and especially since I have been in Israel, but there are few people I can confide in. Really only you. You see, it is a terrible thing to disturb someone's equilibrium. If a person has become accustomed to thinking in a particular way, even a slight digression from that can prove painful. Not everybody is open to new ideas, to making their understanding more precise and supplementing it, to change. I have to admit that I am changing. Today my views on many matters have diverged from those generally accepted in the Catholic world, and I am not the only person in that situation. "You see, the birth of the One whom

It is hot, the light is strong and I have an extraordinary sense of clarity, although quite what is clear I cannot express.

Looking at Rita, I have long found social injustice preferable to the struggle against it.

Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul

There is no escaping life. It takes what is it's due.

Maybe it was true that only beauty would save the world, or truth, or some other high-flown garbage; but fear was still more powerful than anything else. Fear destroyed everything: everything born of beauty, the tender shoots of all that was fine, wise, eternal...

He was a committed ladies' man and obtained a great deal of sustenance from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of women, but he guarded himself vigilantly against addiction, fearful of becoming fodder for that feminine allure which is so paradoxically generous to those who take from it and so destructively cruel to those who give.

Sonechka, meanwhile, placid soul that she was - cocooned by the thousand volumes of her reading, lulled by the hazy murmurings of the Greek myths, the hypnotically shrill recorder fluting of the Middle Ages, the misty windswept yearning of Ibsen, the minutely detailed tedium of Balzac, the astral music of Dante, the siren song of the piercing voices of Rilke and Novalis, seduced by the moralistic despair of the great Russian writers calling out to the heart of heaven itself - this placid soul had no awareness that her great moment was at hand.

I'm afraid, Ilya Isayevich, that you don't have the slightest idea what the function of the secret police is. Exhibits disappear from libraries, personal archives, from museums. They are stolen, sold, exchanged, sometimes consciously destroyed. But I can assure you, in the archives of the secret police nothing is ever lost. True, the number of people granted access to them is extremely limited. But, believe me, there is no place more reliable for safekeeping. Nothing every goes missing there! Moreover, it is the very place where historical truth is preserved.

He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.

Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence. Do you understand? The character of music arises out of its form like steam from water,' Yury Andreevich said. 'With solid understanding of the general laws of form, which encompass all that is amenable to formulation, one can, by groping further, perceive the individual, the particular. Then, subtracting the general, one can sense a residue where wonder lurks in its purest, most undiluted form. Herein lies the goal of theory: the more fully one grasps what is available for comprehension, the more intensely the ineffable shines.