novelists-from-russia

"“You know, those who are motivated by greed, lust for power, or wounded pride are half-way tolerable, at least they feel pangs of conscience sometimes. But there is nothing more fearsome than a bright-eyed enthusiast who’d decided to benefit mankind; such a one can drown the world in blood without hesitation. Those people’s favorite saying is: ‘There are things more important than peace and more terrible than war.’”"

"I have filled the gaps in Tzerlag’s story at my own discretion. The old soldier bears no responsibility for my inventions, especially since many will now passionately charge the storyteller – who else? – with deviating from the mainstream version of the events of the end of the Third Age. One has to note that the public’s knowledge of these events is mostly derived from the adapted Western epos, The Lord of the Rings, at best, and often from the Sword of Isildur TV series and the Galleries of Moria first-person shooter game."

"“Craft the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem, sure, but when it’s time to implement it, you always hide in the bushes. It’s executioners you need, so that you can later point at them in disgust: it’s all their excesses.”"

"This, then, was the yeast on which Barad-Dur rose six centuries ago, that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle Earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic. The shining tower of the Barad-Dur citadel rose over the plains of Mordor almost as high as Orodruin like a monument to Man – free Man who had politely but firmly declined the guardianship of the Dwellers on High and started living by his own reason. It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Númenor."

"“In two or three decades the Elves will turn Middle Earth into a well-tended tidy lawn, and Men into cute pets; they will deprive Man of a very small thing – his right to Create, and grant him a myriad of plain and simple pleasures instead.”"

"“What are we wizards but consumers of that which our predecessors have created, while they are creators of new knowledge? We face the Past, they face the Future. You have once chosen magic, and therefore will never cross the boundaries set by the Valar, whereas in their science the growth of knowledge – and hence, power – is truly unlimited. You are consumed by the worst kind of envy – that of a craftsman for an artist.”"

"I have to sonorously remind those critics that The Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors, who have a clear interest in presenting the vanquished in a certain way. Had genocide taken place back then (where did those peoples vanish if it hadn’t?), then it’s doubly important to convince everybody, including oneself, that those had been orcs and trolls rather than people. Or I could ask them: how often do we find in human history rulers that would relinquish their power, for free, to some nobody from nowhere (pardon me — a Dúnadan from the North)? Yet another subject of immodest curiosity might be the actual payment Elessar Elfstone had to make to the wonderful companions he had acquired on the Paths of the Dead. I mean, summoning the powers of Absolute Evil (for a noble cause, of course) is totally commonplace, he’s neither the first nor the last; but for those powers to meekly revert back to nothingness after doing their job without asking anything in return sounds highly doubtful."

"Men are lying when they say they are terrified of blood."

"Jealousy is not appreciating the loved one."

"And you know, Richard, I’m a physicist and therefore a skeptic."

"Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world."

"The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places."

"He didn’t know the driver, a new guy, some pimply beaked kid, one of the thousands who had recently flocked to Harmont looking for hair-raising adventures, untold riches, international fame, or some special religion; they came in droves but ended up as taxi drivers, waiters, construction workers, and bouncers in brothels—yearning, untalented, tormented by nebulous desires, angry at the whole world, horribly disappointed, and convinced that here, too, they’d been cheated."

"Scared, the eggheads. And maybe that’s how it should be. They should be even more scared than the rest of us ordinary folks put together. Because we merely don’t understand a thing, but they at least understand how much they don’t understand. They gaze into this bottomless pit and know that they will inevitably have to climb down—their hearts are racing, but they’ll have to do it—except they don’t know how or what awaits them at the bottom or, most important, whether they’ll be able to get back out."

"There’s a need to understand, but that doesn’t require knowledge. The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing…Give a man a highly simplified model of the world and interpret every event on the basis of this simple model. This approach requires no knowledge. A few rote formulas, plus some so-called intuition, some so-called practical acumen, and some so-called common sense."

"In some sense, we’re all cavemen—we can’t imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality—that’s actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts…"

"“Look into my soul, I know—everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can’t be bad! The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other than those words of his—HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!”"

"Sometimes I ask myself, Why the hell are we always in such a whirl? For the money? But why in the world do we need money, if all we ever do is keep working?"

"A man needs money in order to never think about it…"

"Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can’t to do a thing! We can’t stop it, we can’t slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It’s not because we do bad work. And it’s not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn’t the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud."

"That’s the Zone for you: come back with swag, a miracle; come back alive, success; come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck; and everything else—that’s fate."

"I wonder why we liked being praised. There’s no money in it. Fame? How famous could we get? He became famous: now he’s known to three."

"We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from the dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts."

"“Your question falls under the umbrella of a pseudoscience called xenology. Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.”"

"Тяжёлый крест достался ей на долю: Страдай, молчи, притворствуй и не плачь; Кому и страсть, и молодость, и волю — Всё отдала, — тот стал ее палач!"

"Средь лицемерных наших дел И всякой пошлости и прозы Одни я в мире подсмотрел Святые, искренние слёзы — То слезы бедных матерей! Им не забыть своих детей, Погибших на кровавой ниве, Как не поднять плакучей иве Своих поникнувших ветвей."

"Ты и убогая, Ты и обильная, Ты и забитая, Ты и всесильная, Матушка-Русь!"

"What? Seventy thousand roubles' worth of jewellery hidden in a chair! Heaven knows who may sit on that chair!"

"There were so many hairdressing establishments and funeral homes in the regional centre of N. that the inhabitants seemed to be born merely in order to have a shave, get their hair cut, freshen up their heads with toilet water and then die."

"… Now you, for instance. You're distinguished-lookin' and tall, though a bit on the thin side. If you should die, God forbid, they'll say you popped off. But a tradesman, who belonged to the former merchants' guild, would breathe his last. And if it's someone of lower status, say a caretaker, or a peasant, we say he has croaked or gone west. But when the high-ups die, say a railway conductor or someone in administration, they say he has kicked the bucket. They say: 'You know our boss has kicked the bucket, don't you?'"

"Long, heavy trains race to all' parts of the country. The way is open at every point. Green lights can be seen everywhere; the track is clear. The polar express goes up to Murmansk. The K-l draws out of Kursk Station, bound for Tiflis, arching its back over the points. The far-eastern courier rounds Lake Baikal and approaches the Pacific at full speed. The Muse of Travel is calling. … People speed all over the country. Some of them are looking for scintillating brides thousands of miles away, while others, in pursuit of treasure, leave their jobs in the post office and rush off like schoolboys to Aldan. Others simply sit at home, tenderly stroking an imminent hernia and reading the works of Count Salias, bought for five kopeks instead of a rouble."

"Liar competition. The first prize was given to the person who told the truth."

"Statistics know everything."

"An attempt to look at New York from a car failed. We were driving along rather dark and gloomy streets. Sometimes something was buzzing like hell under my feet, sometimes something rumbled overhead. When we stopped at traffic lights, the sides of the cars next to us obscured everything. The driver turned around several times and asked for the address. Apparently, he was worried about our English. Sometimes he looked at us encouragingly, and his face said: “Nothing, you won’t get lost! No one has ever lost in New York.”"

"With printing being as well developed as it is in the West, the forgery of Soviet identification papers is nothing. A friend of mine even went as far as forging American dollars. And you know how difficult that is. The paper has those different-coloured little lines on it. It requires great technique. He managed to get rid of them on the Moscow black market, but it turned out later that his grandfather, a notorious currency-dealer, had bought them all in Kiev and gone absolutely broke. The dollars were counterfeit, after all."

"All talented people write differently, all untalented ones write the same way and even in the same handwriting."

"You need to show him some paper, otherwise he won't believe that you exist."

"...She is four years old, but she says she is two. Rare coquetry."

"Not a single car has ever been run over by a pedestrian, yet for some reason motorists are unhappy."

"Every small town [in America] wants to be like New York. There are New Yorks for two thousand people, and there are for one thousand eight hundred. We even came across one baby New York with nine hundred inhabitants. And it was a real city. Its residents walked along their own Broadway with their noses in the air. It is a disputable thing whose Broadway they considered the main thing to be, theirs or New York's one."

"When we went to America, we did not take into account one thing, American hospitality. It boundlessly and far leaves behind everything possible of this kind, including Russian, Siberian or Georgian. The first American you know will definitely invite you to his home (or restaurant) to drink a cocktail with him. Ten of your new acquaintance's friends will be at the cocktail party. Each of them will certainly drag you to their place for a cocktail. And each of them will have ten or fifteen friends. In two days you make a hundred new acquaintances, in a week - several thousand. Staying in America for a year is simply dangerous: you can drink yourself to death and become a vagabond. All several thousand of our new friends were filled with one desire: to show us everything we wanted to see, to go with us wherever we wanted, to explain to us everything that we did not understand. Americans are amazing people, it’s nice to be friends with them, and it’s easy to do business with them."

"It's madness to think that you can drive slowly on an American interstate. The desire to be careful is not enough. Hundreds more cars are running next to your car, thousands of them are pressing behind you, and tens of thousands are rushing towards you. And they all drive at full speed, in a satanic impulse, dragging you along with them. All of America is rushing somewhere, and, apparently, there will be no stopping. Steel dogs and birds sparkle on the cars noses. Among millions of cars, we flew from ocean to ocean — a grain of sand, driven by a gasoline storm that has been raging over America for so many years!"

"In science fiction novels, the main thing was the radio. With it, the happiness of mankind was expected. Now there is a radio, but there is no happiness."

"He got so drunk that he could already perform various minor miracles."

"Just as at the North Station in Moscow the loudspeaker informs summer residents that the nearest train goes non-stop to Mytishchi, and then stops everywhere, here the blacks reported that the elevator goes only to the sixteenth floor, or up to the thirty-second, with the first stop again on the sixteenth floor. Subsequently, we realized this little trick of the administration: on the sixteenth floor there is a restaurant and cafeteria."

"When a woman grows old, many unpleasant things may happen to her: her teeth may fall out, her hair may thin out and turn grey, she may become short-winded, she may unexpectedly develop fat or grow extremely thin, but her voice never changes. It remains just as it was when she was a schoolgirl, a bride, or some young rake's mistress."

"We thought that we would walk slowly, carefully looking around, so to speak, studying, observing, absorbing and so on. But New York is not the kind of city where people move slowly. People did not walk past us, but ran. And we ran too. From then on we couldn't stop. We lived in New York for a month and all the time we were rushing somewhere as fast as we could. At the same time, we looked so busy and businesslike that John Pierpont Morgan Jr. himself could have envied us. At this rate, he would earn sixty million dollars this month."

"New York was sleeping, and millions of electric lamps guarded its sleep. People from Scotland, Ireland, Hamburg and Vienna, Kovno and Bialystok, Naples and Madrid, Texas, Dakota and Arizona were sleeping, people from Latin America, Australia, Africa and China were sleeping. Black, white and yellow people were sleeping. Looking at the slightly fluctuating lights, we wanted to quickly find out: how do these people work, how do they have fun, what do they dream about, what do they hope for, what do they eat?"

"I think faith is important, it’s like a certain spine that you have. … It allows you to see things in a different light. To be calmer in certain situations, to be stronger in other situations, to be able to not always judge other people, to look first at yourself. And I think it’s an important inspiration for my creative work."

"Of course our society in general always presents us with different challenges, and it’s easier to be not who we are but to go on the level, to go down to the level which is less human, it’s more difficult to be humans than not to be humans."