Hamid Ismailov > Quotes

“No matter how far you go into the deep, you are always on the brink of another abyss.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Underground

“Handed down to each person is a kind of thread. Either you can follow that thread all the way to God—or you can tangle the thread, and stumble and strangle in the knots, and lose sight of the right direction and go astray.”
― Hamid Ismailov, Of Strangers and Bees

“At first Abdulla attributed Vinokurov’s brutality to the fact that he was a Russian, but he then recalled that among the men who searched his house there had been an interrogator who spoke Uzbek like a Tatar, replacing all his ‘j’s with ‘y’s.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Devils' Dance

“If a new bride let's the wool fly off,
the wind's beauty is seen across the plain”
― Hamid Ismailov, Manaschi

“But there is such a thing as inspiration, a thing that, once it appears, cannot be got rid of or chased away, until you finally give up on everything and go and get a good night's sleep.”
― Hamid Ismailov, Of Strangers and Bees

“You’ll spend the new year wherever you spent New Year’s day, as the Russian proverb goes.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Devils' Dance

“Only the strongest recite the shahada, say farewell to those around them, and then stride off towards the exit and are transfigured, into the dark. All those who are left behind either recite their prayers or weep quietly. Or sit together, unable to settle down and go back to sleep until morning comes. Everyone knows the fate of those who are taken out at that early hour.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Devils' Dance

“That night, Sina walked the thin line that separates life and death, and he began to understand the meaning of what the storyteller had said: to have repentance in piety, desire in love, asceticism in the straight path, humility in faith, and perseverance in all work.”
― Hamid Ismailov, Of Strangers and Bees

“No matter how far you descend into the deep, you are always on the brink of another abyss.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Underground

“This Uzbek novel gives the reader two for the price of one. The ‘frame’ novel is documentary fiction, a reconstruction of the last months of its main protagonist, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy, as he spend most of 1938 in an NKVD prison during Stalin’s Great Terror, in which three quarters of a million innocent citizens were shot, and several million sent to be worked to death in the Gulags. In Uzbekistan, as in other republics of the USSR, the terror was even worse than in Moscow, for it virtually eliminated, on spurious charges of spying and counter-revolution, not just the Communist Party and local government elite, but much of the country’s intelligentsia and trained professionals.”
― Hamid Ismailov, The Devils' Dance

“The burning coals turned red,
What's gulped down won't come back.
The tiger is lurking in the high steppes, they say,
The Kyrgyz heart is pounding...

Will the Kyrgyz, locked up, now die, alas?
Will every one of our people become a Chinaman, alas?
Will it put fear in the heart, alas?
Will the ugly-faced dark Chinese,
Enjoy trampling us down, alas?”
― Hamid Ismailov, Manaschi