Shirvindt Aleksandr Quotes

If it goes well with you, then all is well. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He said, "Yefrem! Stop griping. Take this book and read it."
Yefrem stopped short, and looked at it dully.
"What for? Why read, when we'll all be dead soon?"
Ogloyed's scar twitched.
"That's exactly why you have to hurry, because you'll soon be dead. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

So that's what I am about? Keeping you together?" Dan turned to face Vadim, and he was pale under the tan. "Keeping you alive? What the fuck happened to the touches in the cave, to the vows and the cutting, to the one fucking big thing that isn't about need and doing but about being? What the fuck happened to the love?" He shook his head, agitated, and damn, this was painful all of sudden. "I don't want to be needed. I want to be loved, for fuck's sake. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

Rub your eyes and purify your heart-and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are printed in their memory! ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I counted on sixty days only, but I held out for 133. I didn't go into power, but to get power I borrowed some power from the President and made him sign a number of decrees and give me enough power to create a system capable of handling crisis situations. ~ Aleksandr Lebed

The days rolled by in the camp - they were over before you could say "knife." But the years, they never rolled by; they never moved by a second. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Surrender one hair, and you'll end up beardless. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted" - "not permitted" - "this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read.
-Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I was always optimistic. And I held to and was guided by my views. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

More weapons hidden on his body than hallelujah-singing angels, dangling from a Christmas tree. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it--but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or any one of its innumerable islands.

Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis­placements in our universe, and both the mo ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All Leningrad Orientalists of the middle and younger generation were arrested. The entire staff of the Institute of the North, except for its NKVD informers, was arrested. They even went after schoolteachers. In Sverdlovsk one case involved thirty secondary schoolteachers and the head of the Provincial Education Department, Perel. 37 One of the terrible accusations against them was that they had made arrangements to have a New Year's tree in order to burn down the school. And the club fell with the regularity of a pendulum on the heads of the engineers - who by this time were no longer "bourgeois" but a whole Soviet generation of engineers. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A human being," Kondrasev continued, "possesses from his birth a certain essence, the nucleus, as it were, of the human being. His 'I'. And it's still uncertain which forms which: whether life forms the man or man, with his strong spirit, forms his life! Because" - Kondrashev-Ivanov suddenly lowered his voice and leaned toward Nerzhin, who was again sitting on the block - "because he has something to measure himself against, something he can look to. Because he has in him an image of perfection which in rare moments suddenly emerges before his spiritual gaze. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I naïvely believed that I had found myself in a society where one can say what one thinks, without having to flatter that society. It turns out that democracy expects to be flattered. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Shukhov had been told that this old man'd been in camps and prisons more years than you could count and had never come under any amnesty. When one ten-year stretch was over they slapped on another. Shukhov took a good look at him close up. In the camp you could pick him out among all the men with their bent backs because he was straight as a ramrod. When he sat at the table it looked like he was sitting on something to raise himself up higher. There hadn't been anything to shave off his head for a long time-he'd lost all his hair because of the good life. His eyes didn't shift around the mess hall all the time to see what was going on, and he was staring over Shukhov's head and looking at something nobody else could see. He ate his thin gruel with a worn old wooden spoon, and he took his time. He didn't bend down low over the bowl like all the others did, but brought the spoon up to his mouth. He didn't have a single tooth either top or bottom-he chewed the bread with his hard gums like they were teeth. His face was all worn-out but not like a goner's-it was dark and looked like it had been hewed out of stone. And you could tell from his big rough hands with the dirt worked in them he hadn't spent many of his long years doing any of the soft jobs. You could see his mind was set on one thing-never to give in. He didn't put his eight ounces of bread in all the filth on the table like everybody else but laid it on a clean little piece of rag that'd been washed over and over agai ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I am not a critic of the West; I am a critic of the weakness of the West. I am a critic of a fact we can't comprehend: how one can lose one's spiritual strength, one's will power and possessing freedom, not value it, not be willing to make sacrifices for it. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Such was a prisoner's life. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence. There ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'll be in position. Vadim left the building, struggling with the emotion, fuck, Dan kissing him like that hat shaken him, deeply. He'd needed that touch, that oath, that everything, but coudln't have responded any other way. Not in Russian, not in English. Couldn't have just held on to him for a moment longer. He wanted to hold him, fuck him, be fucked, he wanted to rest at Dan's shoulder after sex and think nothing but that they were both alive. Fuck the war, fuck the past, fuck the money. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A gentle, warm, sweet pain spreads through my chest at those words. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

Tell me why I shouldn't shoot you," Stefano murmured. Low, intimate, just between them.
"Fun ... would be over too fast? ~ Aleksandr Voinov