Dmitry Glukhovsky > Quotes

“Humans had always been better at killing than any other living thing.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“There's only one thing that can save a man from madness and that's uncertainty.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“And what if there’s nothing in there?’ You die and there’s nothing beyond that. Nothing. Nothing remains. Someone might remember you for a little while after but not for long.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“And then, after five minutes of silence, almost inaudibly, the old man sighed and said, more to himself than to Artyom: ‘Lord, what a splendid world we ruined . . .”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“The number of places in paradise is limited; only in hell is entry open to all.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Do you know the parable about the frog in the cream? Two frogs landed in a pail of cream. One, thinking rationally, understood straight away that there was no point in resistance and that you can’t deceive destiny. But then what if there’s an afterlife – why bother jumping around, entertaining false hopes in vain? He crossed his legs and sank to the bottom. The second, the fool, was probably an atheist. And she started to flop around. It would seem that she had no reason to flail about if everything was predestined. But she flopped around and flopped around anyway . . . Meanwhile, the cream turned to butter. And she crawled out. We honour the memory of this second frog’s friend, eternally damned for the sake of progress and rational thought.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Never discuss the rights of the strong. You are too weak to do that. -Khan”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Cut the chatter!' interrupted Melnick, fiercely. 'Don't you know librarians can't stand noise? For them, noise is like waving a red rag in front of a bull.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“There are some things that you don’t want to do and you pledge to yourself that you won’t do, you forbid yourself, and then suddenly they happen all by themselves. You don’t even have time to think about them, and they don’t make it to the cognitive centres of the brain: they just happen and that’s it, and you’re left just watching yourself with surprise, and convincing yourself that it wasn’t your fault, it just happened all by itself.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Why was he doing this? So that life could continue in the metro? Right. So that they could grow mushrooms and pigs at VDNKh in the future, and so that his stepfather and Zhenkina’s family lived there in peace, so that people unknown to him could settle at Alekseevskaya and at Rizhskaya, and so that the uneasy bustle of trade at Byelorusskaya didn’t die away. So that the Brahmins could stroll about Polis in their robes and rustle the pages of books, grasping the ancient knowledge and passing it on to subsequent generations. So that the fascists could build their Reich, capturing racial enemies and torturing them to death, and so that the Worm people could spirit away strangers’ children and eat adults, and so that the woman at Mayakovskaya could bargain with her young son in the future, earning herself and him some bread. So that the rat races at Paveletskaya didn’t end, and the fighters of the revolutionary brigade could continue their assaults on fascists and their funny dialectical arguments. And so that thousands of people throughout the whole metro could breathe, eat, love one another, give life to their children, defecate and sleep, dream, fight, kill, be ravished and betrayed, philosophize and hate, and so that each could believe in his own paradise and his own hell . . . So that life in the metro, senseless and useless, exalted and filled with light, dirty and seething, endlessly diverse, so miraculous and fine could continue.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Люди всегда умели убивать лучше, чем любое другое живое существо.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Getting a new version of the answer every day, Artyom was unable to compel himself to believe what was true, because the next day another, no less precise and comprehensive one, might arise. Whom should he believe? And in what? ... Any faith served man only as a crutch supporting him. ... He understood why man needs this support. Without it, life would have become empty, like an abandoned tunnel.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Who came up with the idea that telling the truth is easy? That's already a lie.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, FUTU.RE

“we live by legends, and not by bread alone.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“But if they have a flashlight, it means they're human and not some kind of monsters from the surface,' objected Artyom.
"I don't know what's worse," said Melnik, cutting off Artyom.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“As long as man is alive, he will always deem himself to be the light of the world, and consider his enemies as the darkness. And they will be thinking like that on both sides of the front.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky

“Lord, what a splendid world we ruined”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Any faith served man only as a crutch supporting him.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“There was nothing: just an empty, dark tunnel he was supposed to plod his way through, from “Birth” station to “Death” station. Those looking for faith had simply been trying to find the side branches in this line. But there were only two stations, and only tunnel connecting them.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Welcome to the First International Red Fighting Brigade of the Moscow Metropolitan in the name of Ernesto Che Guevara!”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“I 'm reading now Metro 2033.It looks intresting so far”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky

“He who is brave and patient enough to peer into the darkness his whole life will be first to see a flicker of light in it.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Could anyone who had never seen stars possibly imagine what infinity is, when, most likely, the very concept of infinity first appeared among humans inspired, once upon a time, by the nocturnal vault of the heavens?”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Slowly, slowly, his soul was filled with bitterness at the fact that he had stood a step away from enlightenment, from the most real enlightenment, but he hadn’t been resolute, he hadn’t dare give himself to the flow of the tunnel’s ether, and now he would be left to wander in the darkness for his whole life because he was once too afraid of the light of authentic knowledge.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“И все это для чего? Чтобы своей кровью искупить грех первого человека, которого Бог сам же спровоцировал и наказал, и чтобы люди вернулись в рай и вновь обрели бессмертие. Какая-то бессмысленная возня, ведь можно было просто не наказывать так строго их всех за то, чего они даже не делали. Или отменить наказание за сроком давности. Но зачем жертвовать любимым сыном, да еще и предавать его? Где здесь любовь, где здесь готовность прощать, где здесь всемогущество?”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Hate is a fine antidote for fear.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, FUTU.RE

“Do I really deserve this? Artyom thought. Is my life so much more important than the lives of all these people? No, he was glad to have been rescued. But all these people – randomly scattered, like bags and rags, on the granite of the platform, side by side, on the rails, left forever in the poses that Hunter’s bullets had found them in – they all died so that he could live? Hunter had made this exchange with such ease, just as though he had sacrificed some minor chess figures to safeguard one of the most important pieces . . . He was just a player, and the metro was a chessboard, and all the figures were his, because he was playing the game with himself. But here was the question: Was Artyom such an important piece to the game that all these people had to perish for his preservation?”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“Now he only had an abstract interest in what was surrounding him, as though none of this was happening to him, but he was just reading a book about it. The fate of the main character interested him, of course, but if he was killed then he could just pick another book off the shelf - one with a happy ending.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“It’s so much easier for people to die when they believe in something! For those who believe that death isn’t the end of everything. For those in whose eyes the world is separated into black and white – who know exactly what they need to do and why, who hold the torch of an idea, of beliefs, in their hands, and everything they see is illuminated by it. Those who have nothing to doubt and nothing to regret. They must have an easy time of dying. They die with a smile on their face.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033

“He was seized by a cheerful sort of desperation. The whole world was against him, everything was going awry. However, the obstacles that the tunnels put in the way of his mission had awoken in Artyom a rage, and this obstinate rage re-lit his weakening vision with a rebellious fire, devouring in him any fear, sense of danger, reason and force.”
― Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033