Soviet Literature Quotes

All women are lips, nothing but lips. Some pink, firmly round---a ring, a tender protection against the whole world. But these: a second ago they did not exist, and now--a knife slit--and the sweet blood will drip down. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You're a tiger, a lion, a cat. You spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied. You're twenty five. If rings had been fastened to the earth and sky, you'd have seized them and pulled the sky down to earth ~ Isaac Babel

In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood! ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

After a great deal of discussion in Soviet literature about the correct definition of a combination, it was decided that from the point of view of a methodical approach it was best to settle on this definition - A combination is a forced variation with a sacrifice. ~ Alexander Kotov

One of the major principles is that Soviet literature must be inseverably linked with the policy of the Communist party ~ Nikita Khrushchev

I was amongst them – the first female pilot who had got admission to the Sturmoviks…Since my childhood I'd been lucky enough to meet good people. Wherever I studied, wherever I worked I would meet loyal friends, kind-hearted tutors. I was trained at the factory school by the old craftsman Goubanov, I was assisted by the engineer Aliev, who was the shift boss, in my transfer to the most important sector of operations – the tunnel. I was trained by the superb instructor Miroevskiy in the aeroclub, the secretary of the Ulyanovsk District Comsomol Committee gave me a hand at a very hard moment of my life, then there was Maria Borek from Leningrad, the Secretary of the Smolensk District Comsomol Committee, the Commissar of the Smolensk aeroclub…Was it really possible to count all those who had warmed my soul with their sympathy and human kindness and helped me to realize my dream! ~ Anna Timofeeva-Egorova

Literature has always been the last refuge, in this world, for those who do not know where to lay their dreaming heads. ~ Romain Gary

Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity. ~ Elsa Maxwell

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.
~ Jim Harrison

I was travelling through a tunnel of light. The more I travelled, the lighter I felt. I was filled with a kind of ecstasy that I had never known before. I was moving closer and closer to the source of this beautiful light. All I wanted was to merge with that light. But suddenly I fell, like a flower falling off its stem, and returned to my body. ~ Benyamin

There is nothing so charming as the knowledge of literature; of that branch of literature, I mean, which enables us to discover the infinity of things, the immensity of Nature, the heavens, the earth, and the seas; this is that branch which has taught us religion, moderation, magnanimity, and that has rescued the soul from obscurity; to make her see all things above and below, first and last, and between both; it is this that furnishes us wherewith to live well and happily, and guides us to pass our lives without displeasure and without offence. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

I believe that all literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature ... I'm not sure one can be a creative writer and a politician
not a "good" politician. ~ Gayl Jones

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply. ~ Anne Rice

I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path. ~ Edward Hirsch

Literature gives us a memory of lives we did not lead. ~ Mason Cooley

If we [Americans] are a strong people, a united people, why do we always have to hear how great we are? What is this self-love? Where does this come from? It got worse, because after the war we thought we'd won it. That's the first myth. Frankly, Russia won it. The Soviet Union sacrificed far greater form than anyone else to win that war. Secondly, we had the atomic bomb. We should not have dropped it on Japan. We did as an example to the Soviets, not to defeat Japan and to save American lives. These are myths that we explode with a lot of research early on. ~ Oliver Stone

Because of the earth's roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the "authors of our days" – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don't agree? ~ Andre Breton

When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture. ~ Audre Lorde

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. ~ Annie Dillard

I got a servant, a nice clean German girl from the Volga. Her village had been devastated - no other word can convey my meaning - by the liquidation of the Kulaks. In the German Volga Republic the peasants, who had been settled there two hundred years before to set an example to the Russians, had been better farmers and so enjoyed a higher standard of life than most peasants in Russia. Consequently, the greater part of them were classified as Kulaks and liquidated.
***
The girls came to the towns to work as servants, and were highly prized, since they were more competent, cleaner, more honest and self-respecting than the Russian peasants. Curiously, they were the most purely Teutonic Germans I had ever seen, Germans like the pictures in Hans Andersen fairy tales, blue-eyed, with long golden plaits and lovely, fair skins. Being Protestants, and regarding the Russians around them as no better than barbarians, they had intermarried little and retained a racial purity which would no doubt have delighted Hitler.
***
My Hilda seemed a treasure. She could cook, she could read and write, she kept herself and the rooms clean and looked like a pink and flaxen doll. I could treat her as an equal without finding that this led to her stealing my clothes and doing no work.
The servant problem in Moscow for Jane and me lay in our inability to bully and curse and drive, which was the only treatment the Russian servant understood. It was quite natural that this should ~ Freda Utley

Modernist literature with all its vast apparatus was an instrument, a form of perception, and once absorbed, the insights it brought could be rejected without its essence being lost, even the form endured, and it could be applied to your own life, your own fascinations, which could then suddenly appear in a new and significant light. Espen took that path, and I followed him like a brainless puppy, it was true, but I did follow him. I leafed through Adorno, read some passages of Benjamin, sat bowed over Blanchot for a few days, had a look at Derrida and Foucault, had a go at Kristeva, Lacan, Deleuze, while poems by Ekelöf, Björling, Pound, Mallarmé, Rilke, Trakl, Ashbery, Mandelstam, Lunden, Thomsen, and Hauge floated around, on which I spent more than a few minutes, I read them as prose, like a book by MacLean or Bagley, and learned nothing, understood nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase, led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an enrichment, and if they didn't furnish me with insights I became all the richer for intuitions and feelings. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

It was to be a short visit for the G-shevs. More than four days in the U.S. and Raisa's VISA card bill would shatter the fragile Soviet economy. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that. ~ Laura Marling

Those who know me know I won't hesitate to turn around and point someone out. ~ Jim Lehrer

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully. ~ Robert Metcalfe

Humourists lead ... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats. ~ James Thurber

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent. ~ Jonathan Swift

I hope your mamma is quite well?"
This unexpected inquiry put me into such a difficulty that I began saying in the absurdest way that if there had been any such person I had no doubt that she would have been quite well and would have been very much obliged and would have sent her compliments, when the nurse came to my rescue. ~ Charles Dickens

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world. ~ Don DeLillo

I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious. ~ David Shields

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly. ~ Amy Lowell

Anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I am certainly an ought and not a must. ~ E. M. Forster

What emerged for me as purpose was the search for and cultivation of possibilities for experiencing meaningful human transactions in different languages and across cultural differences through play, sports, travel, food, literature, and conversation. I sought to establish relations of mutual understanding and love with people no matter what their culture or place of origin in the world - relations based on philia, eros, and agape, according to context and persons. I perhaps sensed instinctively that such relations were the key to being equally at home everywhere, even in la Yunai. More than an immigrant, at that time I still felt myself to be a sojourner in this country, but I wanted my sojourn to be imbued with the meaning found in earnest, sincere connections with the people and places that life brought to my experience. ~ Daniel G. Campos

Literature wasn't intended to be about perfect people, it was about flaws, very real and very deep human flaws. ~ Erin McCarthy

Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation. ~ Umberto Eco