Well let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them.
Standing on your own feet, naturally, is as tiresome and dangerous as standing your ground; and when the wild dogs begin to circle grinning round you with their dripping tongues hanging out and you kn...
So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made… For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we c...
In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them. Imagine,
I know it’s ridiculous, but I sometimes feel that my love for her is the only thing that’s genuine about me.
But how could he explain anything to them, when they understood good but not goodness, strong but not strength, black but not blackness? Give us bread! the Savages cried. Heal us!They were frightened...
As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do...
Each bullet not a moment but a moment's end...
The sunny times of footsore joy on Arctic islands, for instance, when I reached ice and could glide almost effortlessly through coolness more dazzling than music.
Can you understand your own dreams, which arise with mushrooms' rank richness in the night-forests within your skull?)
Women are sewers just like we are, the once pure boys recognize with a start; it’s raw sewage that produces fertilization; once you understand that you can be fond of yourself and members of the Oppos...
When they’d been children there’d been a fallen log in the river, and John had walked on it, keeping his balance, instructing his brother: If you don’t think about it, you won’t fall.—That would be a...
The awareness in an animal’s eyes is alien beyond knowledge, whereas the gaze from within the dark-glass haunted him because he nearly comprehended it.
So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities.
So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities. Just
On the radio, Klavdia Sulzhenko sang The Blue Kerchief. The war had died; that song was getting old; then again, so was I. But
Life is an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking in his sleeping bag, and...
I’m sure you’ve noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content, or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content toge...
I've come to recognize that questions of law and justice are at the same time questions of power.
But I don't think a river wants anything, except to be itself. Just like anybody and anything. I don't think it claimed a soul. I don't think it's at all vindictive or vicious, just itself. It just se...