Archipelago Quotes

“The natural history of this archipelago is very remarkable; it seems to be a little world within itself.”
― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

“Here’s the sort of people they were. A letter from her fifteen-year-old
daughter came to Yelizaveta Tsvetkova in the Kazan Prison for long-term
prisoners: “Mama! Tell me, write to me — are you guilty or not? I hope you
weren’t guilty, because then I won’t join the Komsomol, and I won’t forgive
them because of you. But if you are guilty—I won’t write you any more and
will hate you.” And the mother was stricken by remorse in her damp
gravelike cell with its dim little lamp: How could her daughter live without
the Komsomol? How could she be permitted to hate Soviet power? Better
that she should hate me. And she wrote: “I am guilty. . . . Enter the
Komsomol!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago