Siberian Hellhole Quotes

There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is no created for such measureless. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship's deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

It's best to love your family as you would a Siberian tiger-from a distance, preferably separated by bars. ~ Stephan Pastis

As a young man, the seer became a rake. He drank and fought and made free with the village girls. He became a wagoner, carrying goods and passengers to other villages, an occupation that extended the range of his conquests. A good talker, sure of himself, he tried every girl he met. His method was direct: he grabbed and started undoing buttons. Naturally, he was frequently kicked and scratched and bitten, but the sheer volume of his efforts brought him notable success. He learned that even in the shyest and primmest of girls, the emptiness and loneliness of life in a Siberian village had bred a flickering appetite for romance and adventure. Gregory's talent was for stimulating those appetites and overcoming all hesitations by direct, good-natured aggression. ~ Robert K. Massie

My father will go see Trans-Siberian Orchestra every single year. I mean, he's completely into it. ~ Eddie Trunk

Asylum. The word always made me
smile. Such a pretty name for a hellhole. ~ Jennifer Estep

I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun. ~ Willy Russell

And what good's a life that leaves nothing behind/Not a thought or a dream that might echo in time. ~ Trans-Siberian Orchestra

Wednesday, November 8th, 1893

Here I sit in the still winter night on the drifting ice-floe, and see only stars above me. Far off I see the threads of life twisting themselves into the intricate web which stretches unbroken from life's sweet morning dawn to the eternal death-stillness of ice. Thought follows thought - you pick the whole to pieces, and it seems so small - but high above all towers one form … Why did you take this voyage? … Could I do otherwise? Can the river arrest its course and run up hill? My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence, high above all silly objections has fallen like a house of cards at the first breath of wind. Build up the most ingenious theories and you may be sure of one thing - that fact will defy them all. Was I so very sure? Yes, at times; but that was self-deception, intoxication. A secret doubt lurked behind all the reasoning. It seemed as though the longer I defended my theory, the nearer I came to doubting it. But no, there is not getting over the evidence of that Siberian drift-wood. But if, after all, we are on the wrong track, what then? Only disappointed human hopes, nothing more. And even if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity? ~ Fridtjof Nansen

Is there anything that doesn't piss you off?"
"Yeah, flowers and sunshine. But there's none of that to be found since this world fell into a hellhole, so you won't see me cracking rainbow smiles or going easy on you anytime soon."
- Jet and Skylla ~ Rachael Wade

His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell f ~ E.L. Doctorow

My last point about getting started as a writer: do something first, good or bad, successful or not, and write it up before approaching an editor. The best introduction to an editor is your own written work, published or not. I traveled across Siberia on my own money before ever approaching an editor; I wrote my first book, Siberian Dawn, without knowing a single editor, with no idea of how to get it published. I had to risk my life on the Congo before selling my first magazine story. If the rebel spirit dwells within you, you won't wait for an invitation, you'll invade and take no hostages. ~ Jeffery Taylor

We're teachers, and we have a commitment." "Commitment to what-to live and die in this hellhole, when we can leave and live like other people? ~ Ulysses S. Grant

WILL YOU TELL MEGAN WELLS SHE IS OUT OF HER COTTONPICKING MIND? if she's that bored with civilization why doesn't she just move to a siberian salt mine? ~ Helene Hanff

As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj
Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate
conclusion - usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of
some substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last
book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible
to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home.
After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must
go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine,
without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes
and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular
view in front of you. ~ Marisha Pessl

Scientists estimate that the Siberian permafrost holds the remains of 150 million mammoths - or about 8 million more than the 142 million Russians aboveground in Russia today. ~ Ian Frazier

What's it called when a hellhole hits a cataclysm? A catastro[phrack]. I just coined that, didn't I? ~ Jon Stewart

I'm writing you this letter from the edge of the world. According to a Siberian proverb, the forest was made by the devil. The devil did a good job; his forest is as big as the United States of America. But maybe the devil made the United States too. ~ Chris Marker

It's like this,' began the elder. 'All these sentences of hard labour in Siberian prisons, and formerly with flogging, too, do not reform anyone and, what's more, scarcely deter even one criminal, and, far from diminishing, the number of crimes are steadily increasing. You have to admit that. It therefore follows that society is not in the least protected, for though a harmful member is cut off automatically and exiled to some remote spot just to get rid of him, another criminal takes his place at once, and often, two, perhaps. If anything does protect society even today and indeed reforms the criminal himself and brings about his regeneration, it is, again, only the law of Christ, which reveals itself in the awareness of one's own consciousness. Only by recognizing his own guilt as a son of a Christian society, that is, of the Church, does the criminal recognize his guilt towards society itself, that is, towards the Church. The criminal today, therefore, is capable of recognizing his guilt only towards the Church, and not towards the State. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Yesterday I wrote the majority of a song called 'Burn the Nightclub Down' which was about kind of driving into Cleveland full of dread at the prospect of playing at this night club and actually just the night before I had called my girlfriend whose birthday it was. And it's her birthday and here I am on the road in some hellhole in Ann Arbor in Michigan. ~ Rhett Miller

Further north, I met a Siberian hermit who lived in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. His life's passion was wrestling black bears ... in the nude (him not the bears). He did not know why he did it. All the hermit knew was that if he stopped wrestling bears, he would die. ~ Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

...told me to stop being a stupid town boy. She said that if I ever tried to go away from her again, she'd break my legs. She's very romantic, that girl. Sweet as a kitten...if a kitten was a Siberian tiger with mood issues. ~ Jonathan Maberry

Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana? Try to imagine this: You're a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it's directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep. And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone, possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That's hysteria siberiana. ~ Haruki Murakami

The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian airports- to break the icy seal. Stepping outside was like stepping onto another planet, for at those low temperatures nothing seems quite normal. The air burns. Sounds are brittle. Every breath hovers in a strangle slow-motion cloud, adding to the mist of ice that pervades the city and blurs the sun. When the breath freezes into ice dust and falls almost silently to the ground, Siberians call it the whisper of stars. ~ David K. Shipler

You've got to cram it into your thick heads: the sickos that sent us to this place are so stuffed with hate they've got to spew it out on someone, it almost doesn't matter who. If it's not one race, face or religion it'd be another. Right now it's us they vomit on. Next war it'll be some other poor beggars, then some others, then -'
'I want to go home!' the poor woman gasped, in between shakes and sobs.
'And I want to murder every last beast in this hellhole with my bare hands,' Girder raged. She had hands as big as dinner plates. 'The best we can do instead is live. Are you listening? The only way to beat them is by not dying. So shut up and survive, you miserable cow. And let the rest of us sleep. ~ Lucy Adlington

Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz The poor child cries as alone he goes There's no bread and there's no fat The party's ended all of that Seek not the gentle nor the mild A father's eaten his own child The party man he beats and stamps And sends us to Siberian camps38 ~ Timothy Snyder

Go shower. I'll do penance and take Radulf out."

Ben ruffled his hair. "It's very cold. Not too long, yeah?"

"For God's sake, I survived a Siberian gulag."

"I was talking about the dog. ~ John Wiltshire

Clearly, Siberian reindeer are not fighting over drugged urine for its nutrative value. ~ David J. Linden

I was studying my 'Bold and Beautiful' script the other day, lying in a hammock, when one of my Siberian tigers walked up and grabbed it out of my hand - she wanted to play. See - teeth marks! ~ Tippi Hedren

Homer: New York is a hellhole. And you know how I feel about hellholes!

Lisa: Dad, you can't judge a place you've never been to.

Bart: Yes, that's what people do in Russia. ~ The Simpsons

While other founding fathers were reared in tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, Hamilton grew up in a tropical hellhole of dissipated whites and fractious slaves, all framed by a backdrop of luxuriant natural beauty. On ~ Ron Chernow

Music always reminded him of the voice of God, for it needed no translation and could reach and renew the soul like very few other things could. ~ Trans-Siberian Orchestra

In this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected. ~ John Dos Passos

Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it "normal," and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called "human nature" was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes's dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana. ~ Christopher Ryan

When that small Siberian bird fell out of the sky over Gray's River, not once but twice, he brought with him the sweetness of chance in any place, the certainty of wonder in all places. And if that's not grace, I don't know what it. ~ Robert Michael Pyle

I'm a writer and I'm feeling like death, as you would too if you'd just flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan at some ungodly hour of the morning only to discover that you can't get into your hotel room for another three hours. In fact it's enough just to have flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you are a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, then please assume that I am just kidding. Anyone else will surely realise that I am not.

Having nowhere else to go, I am standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece. Well, a kind of mantelpiece. I don't know what it is, in fact. It's made of brass and some kind of plastic and was probably drawn in by the architect after a nasty night on the town. That reminds me of another favourite piece of information: there is a large kink in the trans-Siberian railway because when the Czar (I don't know which Czar it was because I am not in my study at home I'm leaning against something shamefully ugly in Michigan and there are no books) decreed that the trans-Siberian railway should be built, he drew a line on a map with a ruler. The ruler had a nick in it. ~ Douglas Adams

Aware of her uneasy gaze straying to his rampant arousal, Sebastian shot her a scornful glance.
"Pay it no mind," he said, climbing into bed with her. "From now on, I have every expectation that proximity to you will affect my private parts like a prolonged swim in a Siberian lake. ~ Lisa Kleypas

As this drama played out in Moscow, over two thousand miles to the east in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk; six men gathered on the stairs of one of the old communist era apartment blocks. ~ Pete Buckley

What was that all about? She looked like a pissed-off Siberian tiger."
"Believe me, Prit, a Siberian tiger is a pussycat compared to Lucia. ~ Manel Loureiro

November 18, 2014: it's a day that should live forever in history. On that day, in the city of Yiwu in China's Zhejiang province, 300 kilometers south of Shanghai, the first train carrying 82 containers of export goods weighing more than 1,000 tons left a massive warehouse complex heading for Madrid. It arrived on December 9th. Welcome to the new trans-Eurasia choo-choo train. At over 13,000 kilometers, it will regularly traverse the longest freight train route in the world, 40% farther than the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway. Its cargo will cross China from East to West, then Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, France, and finally Spain. ~ Anonymous

I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular. ~ Blaise Cendrars

The youngest warrior scowled at him and rattled off something in a dialect Kade was unfamiliar with.

What backwater hellhole did these two mongrels climb out of?

A knot of tension began building in his shoulders, the desire to react growing almost unbearable.

He looked once more around the room, and when he was sure there would be no one around to run and get the chief's guards, Kade eased back in his chair a little, a placating smile on his face as he prepared to kill them as swiftly as possible. ~ Sarah Addison-Fox

I fall asleep
Call it deep while all is well be-
Cause my life seems like a freestyle mean-
While asleep on the couch I dream it's a written piece and now
The symphony's sounding
Shouting out to these feet whose leaps feel foul but quite loud
But how
I'm allowed to live my dreams
My Chimeran team brings the Siberian breed
Riding reality free 'til these tires they freeze
In mires in dire need of wires, fire and heat but
I love a dark, hard cold heart in the wintery breeze ~ Criss Jami

Before this grief, mountains must bend down
And rivers stop,
But prison locks are strong,
And behind them are the labor-camp bunks
And the deadly tedium.
For others the fresh breeze is blowing,
For others the extravagant sun sets -
For us everything is the same, we know nothing,
We hear only the keys and their hateful grinding.
Only the soldiers' stiff steps.
We get up as for early Mass in the city,
The savaged city, and coming
We meet ourselves, the dead, the unbreathing.
The sun is low, the Neva misty,
It is only in the distance that hope is singing.
The sentence . . . and at once tears,
Now everything has been taken,
The rest of life, torn from her heart,
Knocked backwards by a hoodlum
And yet she walks . . . stumbles . . . alone . . .
Where are they now, unwilling friends
Of years in Hell?
What visions do they see in Siberian snow-storms?
What hallucinations in the circle of the moon?
I send them this goodbye and wish them well. ~ Anna Akhmatova

My dad called the cops and told them I stole his car."
I roll my eyes. "Your old man put you in this hellhole? On purpose?"
"He thought it would teach me a lesson."
"Yeah," I say. "The lesson is that your old man's an asshole." The dad should have taught his son how to dress better instead.
"My mom'll bail me out."
"You sure?"
White Guy straightens. "She's a lawyer, and my dad's done this before. A few times. I think to piss off my mom and get her attention. They're divorced."
I shake my head. White people. ~ Simone Elkeles

Was a clear, pale blue like the eyes of a Siberian husky dog. Human beings just didn't have eyes like that. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Oh gosh, it's moving! It's so gross! Can't you just, like, flex your butt or something?
Why, yes. Travis clenched his teeth. Why don't I just clench my butt muscles in hopes that it will shock the spider enough to crawl back into the hellhole it came out of? ~ Rachel Van Dyken

A whole world exists outside of that hellhole. ~ Courtney Summers

It's good by comparison only! Yes, there are worse places, but so long as this hellhole is considered the ideal, we'll never get anywhere. We cannot let them convince us this is normal! ~ Brandon Sanderson

You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralyzing venom, while the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing. ~ Bill Bailey

The South was a scary new world. The first time I saw a possum in my driveway, I shook a bony fist at the sky and cursed this godforsaken rustic hellhole. My ancestors spent centuries in the hills of County Kerry, waist-deep in sheep shit, getting shot at by English soldiers, and my grandparents crossed the ocean in coffin ships to come to America, just so I could get possum rabies? ~ Rob Sheffield