Nikolai Kotova Quotes

Levin felt that in his soul, in the very bottom of his soul, his brother Nikolai, despite the ugliness of his life, was not more in the wrong than those who despised him. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Youth is feeling seventy years old, misanthropic, and ready to die at fifteen ~ Nikolai Grozni

Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's Nose. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The King scowled. "She is a traitor to the crown. I want her head."
To my surprise, Genya said to Nikolai, "I will take my punishment if he takes his. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Oh, I cannot understand these points - absolutely I cannot. And the strangest, most unintelligible fact of all is that authors actually can select such occurrences for their subject! I confess this too to pass my comprehension, to -But no; I will say just that I do not understand it. In the first place, a course of the sort never benefits the country. And in the second place - in the second place, a course of the sort never benefits anything at all. I cannot divine the use of it. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Yes, for every man there exist certain things which, instantly that they are said, seem to touch him more closely, more intimately, than anything has done before. Nor is it an uncommon occurrence that in the most unexpected fashion, and in the most retired of retreats, one will suddenly come face to face with a man whose burning periods will lead one to forget oneself and the tracklessness of the route and the discomfort of one's nightly halting-places, and the futility of crazes and the falseness of tricks by which one human being deceives another. And at once there will become engraven upon one's memory - vividly, and for all time - the evening thus spent. And of that evening one's remembrance will hold true, both as to who was present, and where each such person sat, and what he or she was wearing, and what the walls and the stove and other trifling features of the room looked like. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Internal discord reflects external disunion, that is, the separation of the learned and intellectual classes from the people. Intelligence without feeling becomes the knowledge of evil without any desire to root it out, and a knowledge of good without any wish to promote it. ~ Nikolai F. Fedorov

Would I be healed now if you gave me your blood, Nikolai?"
"Are you asking me for it?"
"If I were, would you give it to me? ~ Lara Adrian

Never has a gift for pining," Nikolai said. "Though I do like to show off my profile by staring mournfully out of windows. ~ Leigh Bardugo

What terrible harm Wagner did by interspersing his pages of genius with harmonic and modulatory outrages to which both young and old are gradually becoming accustomed and which have procreated d'Indy and Richard Strauss. ~ Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

He would shoot his adversary in a duel, and go against a bear if need be, and fight off a robber in the forest
all as successfully and fearlessly as L
n, yet without any sense of enjoyment, but solely out of unpleasant necessity, listlessly, lazily, even with boredom. Anger, of course, constituted a progress over L
n, even over Lermontov. There was perhaps more anger in Nikolai Vsevolodovich than in those two together, but this anger was cold, calm, and if one may put it so, reasonable, and therefore the most repulsive and terrible that can be. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

People were always ready to yield their
wills, to worship the hero, because they were not given a chance
for developing initiative, stability, and independence, said the great
nineteenth-century Russian sociologist Nikolai Mikhailovsky ~ Ernest Becker

In order to see the world in a true light and everything in its proper shape, in order to contemplate the wide horizon, we must climb out of the pit of self-centeredness and rise to a height. We must see the center of being not in ourselves but in God, where it truly is, and then everything will fall into the right place. Humility in its ontological meaning is the heroic conquest of selfhood and ascent to the heights of theocentrism. ~ Nikolai A. Berdyaev

A time of famine and poverty will come and the people as a whole as well as every individual in it will suffer. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Goodness, how sad is our Russia! ~ Nikolai Gogol

Her time is better spent with me. The thorn wood is a path you walk alone, boy king."
"But it's a very arduous path," Nikolai said. "Who will carry my snacks? ~ Leigh Bardugo

Russia! Russia ... Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like counters; there is nothing to tempt or enchant the onlooker's gaze. But what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you? ~ Nikolai Gogol

In this world, people always find a way of doing what they want ~ Nikolai Gogol

The creation of the world is not only a process which moves from God to humanity. God demands newness from humanity; God awaits the works of human freedom. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

There was always more with Nikolai, wasn't there? More pain, more pleasure, more joy, more grief, more religious fucking ecstasy. ~ Rachel Haimowitz

The mind is a strange thing: it works in secret. Oftentimes the most important decisions in life are made while you're not paying attention. ~ Nikolai Grozni

He smiled sadly. "I was lost from the moment I saw you on Ovchinin Island. It took a long while for me to realize it, but it's true. I've spent my entire life scrambling to fit in and to change myself, Vika, but where I've belonged, and who I needed to be, has been right here the whole time. I love you. ~ Evelyn Skye

On the bottom staff - the taste of earth, worms, and dust; the smell of dead leaves and frankincense. On the top - the luminosity of awareness making sense of transience and predestination. Three quiet major chords marked the moment of death, because death was sweet. It was our true home, the home we'd left and been trying to get back to. It's what we had passed through before and would pass through again, a moment of truth that suspended the weight of thought, the weight of the will to inhabit a dead universe. ~ Nikolai Grozni

I shall think soon that what people say is true: every woman is possessed by her own peculiar devil of curiosity ~ Nikolai Gogol

There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. [ ... ] The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power ... the Kingdom of God is anarchy. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

The net of it is, we can't count on any cooperation out of Sergei Yakut. He basically told me to shove it, and that was before I called him a sick fuck in need of a muzzle and choke collar."
"Jesus, Niko," Gideon sighed, probably, on the other end of the line, scrubbing his hand through his spiky blond hair in frustration. "You really said that to him - to a Gen One? You're damn lucky he didn't tear your tongue out before he sent you on your way."
Probably true, Nikolai acknowledged to himself. And he'd have lost more than just his tongue if Yakut knew the kind of lust he had been feeling for Renata. "You know I'm allergic to ass-kissing, even if the ass in question happens to be Gen One. If this was a total public relations mission, you picked the wrong guy."
"No shit." Gideon chuckled around another low curse. "You coming back in to Boston, then?"
"I see no reason to linger. Unless you figure Lucan will look the other way if I decide to go back and put a torch to Yakut's house of horrors. Put him out of business, at least for a while."
He was kidding . . . mostly. ~ Lara Adrian

Nikolai stroked her cheek, then wrapped her in his embrace. "You're safe," he said tenderly beside her ear. "I've got you, and I'm going to keep you safe. ~ Lara Adrian

The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities. ~ Nikolai Gogol

I am who I am and that's who I am ~ Nikolai Gogol

I have a problem,' said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. 'I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers' collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?' 'Yes, of course.' 'Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists? ~ Adam Roberts

Stop punishing yourself for being someone with a heart. You cannot protect yourself from suffering. To live is to grieve. You are not protecting yourself by shutting yourself off from the world. You are limiting yourself. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Thanks from keeping me from being a liar," said Nikolai.
"What?"
"About your having diarrhea."
"For you I'd get dysentery."
"Now that's friendship. ~ Orson Scott Card

Have you even held a command? Nikolai asked. I'd once led a seminar of junior mapmakers, but I didn't think that was what he meant. ~ Leigh Bardugo

The "laughter through tears of sorrow" that Pushkin noted elsewhere in his work is precisely laughter. The images it produces are too deeply ambiguous to bear any social message. ~ Nikolai Gogol

But the future is unknown, and stands before a man like autumnal fogs rising from the swamps; birds fly foolishly up and down in it with flapping wings, never recognizing each other, the dove seeing not the vulture, nor the vulture the dove, and no one knowing how far he may be flying from destruction. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Any reason you didn't tell me Myst married a general in the Forbearer army, more specifically a vampire?"
"Lookit, I didn't want to distract you from your job," Regin said. "This Hie is your Big Thing. And I know when I first found out, I was seriously, fucking, shrieking, distracted. I mean, I knew you would never get freaked out - well, at least, you wouldn't used to - but I thought it would be prudent to just hold off a few days. It was my idea, not Myst's."
"This connection might have been nice to know in certain situations, Regin. For instance, that vampire in Antarctica that you almost killed is now our brother-in-law!"
"No way! Nikolai Wroth's brother?" A pause. "But does that matter? Can't we still kill him? I wouldn't have told anyone if you wouldn't have. What happens in the South Pole, stays in the - ~ Kresley Cole

But if you loved a thing, the work was never done ~ Leigh Bardugo