Russian Dolls Quotes

The word begone is a Russian doll. A small, single word, which contains so many others; and when all the smaller words inside line up, they look like a bridge: Be Beg Ego Go On One. ~ Craig Stone

Russian Dolls: The more we stay layered up, the more we stay reactive. Instead of healing, our hardnesses bump into one another. We knock each other off balance, intentionally or not. That might sometimes peel away a little paint, making a crack in an outer façade. But those cracks allow light and insights in. And out. ~ Helen S. Rosenau

It occurs to him that there are different versions of himself to farewell - the abandoned eight-year-old; the delusional soldier who hovered somewhere in hell; the lightkeeper who dared to leave his heart undefended. Like Russian dolls, these lives sit within him. ~ M.L. Stedman

I have collections of quirky things from places I've been to, like a set of Russian dolls. ~ Emma Watson

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an accordion; but they can also be stacked inside one another like Russian dolls, where the walls around time periods are extremely close to one another. The people of other centuries hear our phonographs blaring, and through the walls of time we see them raising their hands towards the deliciously prepared meal. ~ Elisabeth Lenk

Rostov was not listening to the soldier. He looked at the snowflakes dancing above the fire and remembered the Russian winter with a warm, bright house, a fluffy fur coat, swift sleighs, a healthy body, and all the love and care of a family. "And why did I come here?" he wondered. ~ Leo Tolstoy

happen to know any Russian ~ Susan Wiggs

The glutton cannot turn his mind to God," he said dismissively. "But neither can the starving man. ~ Katherine Arden

Disrespect one of our associates and face the penalty | This was our creed. There should have been corpses floating that cold September eve. This was the perfect place to do it, too, in the middle of the ocean where gunfire goes unheard and chopped up limbs and torsos would be lucky to survive the predators and float onto a beach weeks or even months later. ~ Gary Govich

I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds. My father and I chuckled. What happened to him? Gone. My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you're made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It's only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. ~ Zia Haider Rahman

There was a Russian director named Elem Klimov, who did his films during the communist days. They were constantly struggling with the authorities and to be allowed to express themselves. But he did one of the best war movies I've ever seen - it's called 'Come and See.' ~ Stellan Skarsgard

Native Soil

There's
Nobody simpler than us, or with
more pride, or fewer tears.
(1922)

Our hearts don't wear it as an amulet,
it doesn't sob beneath the poet's hand,
nor irritate the wounds we can't forget
in our bitter sleep. It's not the Promised Land.
Our souls don't calculate its worth
as a commodity to be sold and bought;
sick, and poor, and silent on this earth,
often we don't give it a thought.
Yes, for us it's the dirt on our galoshes,
yes, for us it's the grit between our teeth.
Dust, and we grind and crumble and crush it,
the gentle and unimplicated earth.
But we'll lie in it, become its weeds and flowers,
so unembarrassedly we call it - ours. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Choose.
She closed the door and stamped her feet on the icy ground, smiling as she drew in a deep breath of Russian air and felt her heart race. There was a future ahead, one that she and Chang An Lo would carve together. It was a risk, but life itself was a risk. That much she'd learned form Russia, that much she'd learned from Jens. With a farewell wave to Alexei and a final touch of the Chinese amulet around her neck to tempt the protection of Chang An Lo's gods one last time, she looped her bag onto her shoulder and headed for the gateway. ~ Kate Furnivall

My parents were worried about me, certainly when I became so deeply interested in music and people like the New York Dolls who, at the time, were very peculiar indeed. ~ Morrissey

The refusal of the British and Russian peoples to accept what appeared to be inevitable defeat was the great factor in the salvage of our civilization. ~ George C. Marshall

In the Russian experience, although the Russian state is oppressive, it is their state, it is part of their fabric, and so the relation between Russian citizens and their state is complicated. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

The Donetsk People's Republic is the self-declared pro-Russian government that wants to break away from Ukraine. ~ Richard Engel

Monday night that Russian forces had dramatically escalated the standoff ~ Anonymous

The Ukrainian authorities said Thursday that former President Viktor F. Yanukovych and Russian security agents were involved in plans for elite police units ~ Anonymous

Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. ~ George Orwell

Now her life was under attack, and she [Kit] was shocked to find how fragile everything she'd built really was. She was dumbfounded, too to find that while people were being ripped from her life like paper dolls from a chain, she longed to be the one who'd be gone first. ~ Vicki Pettersson

But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life that present themselves, and desire that alone. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions. ~ Alexander Pushkin

No one I interact with - except maybe for family and strangers at the Russian baths and other weird places I may go to - is just friends or lovers with me: they also know something of my writing and this distorts their take on me ~ Jonathan Ames

Personally, I'm a mess of conflicting impulses - I'm independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I'm the only one who feels this way. It's the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable - your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers - and pretend they're across the room. It's too ugly to be human. It's too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves.
Oh we're a mess, poor humans, poor flesh - hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We've been to the moon and we're still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It's two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I'd know it was something true. Now I'm trying to dig deeper. ~ Richard Siken

Musical chairs or Russian roulette? Sometimes there's as much tense drama in the casting of a Hollywood movie as there is in the finished product. ~ Richard Corliss

Bond closed his eyes and mentally explored his body. The worst pain was in his wrists and ankles and in his right hand where the Russian had cut him. In the centre of the body there was no feeling. He assumed that he had been given a local anaesthetic. The rest of his body ached dully as if he had been beaten all over. He could feel the pressure of bandages everywhere and his unshaven neck and chin prickled against the sheets. From the feel of the bristles he knew that he must have been at least three days without shaving. That meant two days since the morning of the torture. ~ Ian Fleming

When he moves away from people, he wants neither to belong nor to fight, but keeps apart. He feels he has not much in common with them, they do not understand him somehow. He builds up a world of his own -with nature, with his dolls, his books, his dreams. ~ Karen Horney

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life
as if life could be put off for a time
what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions
his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it
the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. ~ Boris Pasternak

Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work. ~ James Fenton

Suicide doll's suicide
Pretty, but with death there's no way to hide
Afraid to make a cut, see there's nothing inside
If your friends told you to jump off a bridge
You'd step to the edge and fly.
._. ~ Rae Mariz

Interviewer: Did you hear t.A.T.u's version of 'How Soon Is Now'?
Morrissey: Yes, it was magnificent. Absolutely. Again, I don't know much about them.
Interviewer: They're the teenage Russian lesbians.
Morrissey: Well, aren't we all? ~ Morrissey

I love to design. I am a commercial fashion designer. I always design jackets with two sleeves. I don't design jackets with three sleeves, or the layers and layers come off like little dolls from Russia. Fashion for me is a creative endeavor, but it is not art for me. ~ Tom Ford

Behind this lies not just impact or drama, but a typically Japanese tendency. The story of Pygmalion, the Greek myth - in which Pygmalion falls in love with the statue of a young woman that he creates and which is hen transformed into a human by Aphrodite who imbues it with life - represents a Western approach in which the statue represents the human body. In Japan, however, there is a unique predilection for dolls ... This can be interpreted as a decadent, necrophiliac erotic story but it can also be interpreted as a propensity for Japanese men to fall in love with figures. These men's desires are directed at the figure for the very reason that it is a doll. The overwhelming passivity of the doll is a reflection of the behavior of a certain type of Japanese man whose immaturity makes it very difficult for him to establish an equal relationship with a mature woman. ~ Izima Kaoru

Why don't you want to see your mom? Did she burn your
dolls in a sacrificial fire? Read your e-mail?"
"She wants to run my life," I explain.
"What a bitch. It's like she thinks she's your mother
or something."
"She's a psychopath," I said. "It's complicated."
"Psychopaths can't afford fur coats."
"This one can. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death. ~ Anthony Marra

When I was doing drugs and alcohol, I thought I'll have a drink and a line of this and I'll smoke this. I didn't go, 'Then I'm going to go out and get drunk, come back strangle my wife and wake up in jail on charges of attempted murder,' but that's what happened. I'm not telling people what to do. If they can enjoy doing it and they get on with it and they can handle it fine, but don't involve me. I'm lucky to be alive; you're playing with Russian roulette. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was his blasphemous, antinomian, "cynical" strain. The fight that always occurs between the generations was exceptionally bitter at the end of the Great War; this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was an indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle was in any case due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and security of life in England, which even the war hardly disturbed, many people whose ideas were formed in the 'eighties or earlier had carried them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far as the younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were dissolving like sand-castles. The slump in religious belief, for instance, was spectacular. For several years the old - young antagonism took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the war generation had crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the slogans of 1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing under dirty-minded celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman appealed, with his implied sexual revolt and his personal grievance against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a harmless old-fashioned way, to the tune of red coats and "God save the Queen" rather than steel helmets and "Hang the Kaiser." And he was satisfyingly anti-Christian - he stood for a k ~ George Orwell

Hmm," she said. "'Curiouser and curiouser,' to quote Alice. ~ Deborah Blake

The rational revolution, on its part, wants to realize the total man described by Marx. The logic of
history, from the moment that it is totally accepted, gradually leads it, against its most passionate
convictions, to mutilate man more and more and to transform itself into objective crime. It is not
legitimate to identify the ends of Fascism with the ends of Russian Communism. The first represents the
exaltation of the executioner by the executioner; the second, more dramatic
in concept, the exaltation of the executioner by the victims. The former never dreamed of liberating all
men, but only of liberating a few by subjugating the rest. The latter, in its most profound principle, aims
at liberating all men by provisionally enslaving them all. ~ Albert Camus