“Don’t try playing snooker,” James said. “The room’s on a slant and all the balls roll to the side.”

“They all laughed when I said I'd become a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.”
― Crying With Laughter : My Life Story
― Crying With Laughter : My Life Story

“Sometimes the principal emotion of the person arrested is relief and even happiness! This is another aspect of human nature. It happened before the Revolution too: the Yekaterinodar schoolteacher Serdyukova, involved in the case of Aleksandr Ulyanov, felt only relief when she was arrested. But this feeling was a thousand times stronger during epidemics of arrests when all around you they were hauling in people like yourself and still had not come for you; for some reason they were taking their time. After all, that kind of exhaustion, that kind of suffering, is worse than any kind of arrest, and not only for a person of limited courage.”
― The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
― The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
― The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
― The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“He'd always liked women who'd talk back to him just a little bit. "Girls with balls" were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells.”
― Crooked Little Vein
― Crooked Little Vein

“This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”
― Animal Farm
― Animal Farm
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