Russian Literature Quotes

“But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“It's a lucky man, a very lucky man, who is committed to what he believes, who has stifled intellectual detachment and can relax in the luxury of his emotions - like a tipsy traveller resting for the night at wayside inn.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“He filled a shelf with a small army of books and read and read; but none of it made sense. .. They were all subject to various cramping limitations: those of the past were outdated, and those of the present were obsessed with the past.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“..depression still kept guard on him, and chased after him like a shadow - or like a faithful wife.”
― Alexander Pushkin , Eugene Onegin

“All of these things, however, were but like methadone to a heroin addict. They only masked the withdrawal pains without satisfying the addiction. So even as they tried truly to break up many times, they always found their way back to each other.”
― L. M. Weeks, Bottled Lightning

“We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“That must be Bogrov,” Alexei said as he put on a black ski mask. Laughing, he tossed one to Torn. “Don’t worry, it’s clean. Let me do the talking. This is how we take depositions in the Wild Wild East!”
― L. M. Weeks, Bottled Lightning

“We’re at the crematorium having lunch,”—which struck Torn as a darkly funny thing to say—“but I’m glad you called.”
― L. M. Weeks, Bottled Lightning

“How many languages do you speak, you barely monolingual prick?”
― L. M. Weeks, Bottled Lightning

“For some a prologue, for some an epilogue.”
― Bulgakov Mikhail Afanas'evich

“She said nothing, she only looked at me without a word. But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don't blame!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The young officer, looking like a deer caught in the headlights, stopped for a moment and then said, a bit shakily, “You’re under arrest.”
― L. M. Weeks, Bottled Lightning

“Reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is comparable to pushing a beautiful grand piano up a very steep hill.”
― Kevin Ansbro

“at one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Credo che non ti amerei tanto se in te non ci fosse nulla da lamentare, nulla da rimpiangere. Io non amo la gente perfetta, quelli che non sono mai caduti, non hanno inciampato. La loro è una virtù spenta, di poco valore. A loro non si è svelata la bellezza della vita.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“I believe you!' the artiste exclaimed finally and extinguishes his gaze. 'I do! These eyes are not lying! How many times have I told you that your basic error consists in underestimating the significance of the human eye. Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes - never! A sudden question is put to you, you don't even flinch, in one second you get hold of yourself and know what you must say to conceal the truth, and you speak quite convincingly, and not a wrinkle on your face moves, but - alas - the truth which the question stirs up from the bottom of your soul leaps momentarily into your eyes, and it's all over! They see it, and you're caught!”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.”
― Mirra Ginsburg, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories

“Now life is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that's the basis of the whole deception. Now man is still not what he should be. There will e a new man, happy and proud. Whoever doesn't care whether he lives or doesn't live, he himself will be God. And that other God will no longer be.'
'So, that other God does exist, in your opinion?'
'He doesn't exist, but he does exist. In the stone there' no pain, but in the fear of the stone there is pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer... ("Letter To Stalin")”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“All the evil in man, one would think, should disappear on contact with Nature, the most spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych & Other Stories

“And where there is love, you can live even without happiness. Life is good even in sorrow; it is good to live in the world. However you live.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“...es insoportable ver solo ante si la larga hilera de comidas, mirar la vida como una ceremonia y seguir a la solemne multitud, sin compartir con ella las opiniones generales ni las pasiones.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“There was much that was endearing in this strangely Russian search for absolutes —such as the passion for big ideas that gave the literature of nineteenth-century Russia its unique character and power—and yet the underside of this idealism was a badgering didacticism, a moral dogmatism and intolerance, which in its own way was just as harmful as the censorship it opposed.”
― Orlando Figes

“Несовпадение душ неизменное
порождает вопросы пустые,
суету дополняя душевную
объясненьями непростыми...”
― Ekaterina Yakovina, Prikosnovenie Vechnosti

“Do not have for your husband the love that is like friendship. Have for him the friendship that is like love.”
― Denis Fonvizin

“Of my own fortunes, interested though I was in the affair, I took no account. I was in the strange position of possessing but two hundred gülden, of being at a loose end, of lacking both a post, the means of subsistence, a shred of hope, and any plans for the future, yet of caring nothing for these things. Had not my mind been so full of Polina, I should have given myself up to the comical piquancy of the impending denouement, and laughed my fill at it. But the thought of Polina was torture to me. That her fate was settled I already had an inkling; yet that was not the thought which was giving me so much uneasiness. What I really wished for was to penetrate her secrets. I wanted her to come to me and say, "I love you," and, if she would not so come, or if to hope that she would ever do so was an unthinkable absurdity-why, then there was nothing else for me to want. Even now I do not know what I am wanting. I feel like a man who has lost his way. I yearn but to be in her presence, and within the circle of her light and splendour-to be there now, and forever, and for the whole of my life. More I do not know. How can I ever bring myself to leave her?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“He wept on account of his helplessness, his terrible loneliness, the cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, and the absence of God.

‘Why have you done all this? Why have you don this to me? Why have you brought me here? Why, why do you torment me so terribly?’

He did not expect an answer, and yet wept because there was no answer and could be none.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“The Russian peoples feel always a certain sympathy for the drunken man”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead