Quote

Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Yevgeny Zamyatin
Age: 53 †
Born: 1884
Born: January 1
Died: 1937
Died: January 1
Author
Engineer
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Prosaist
Satirist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin
Eugene Zamyatin
World
Squares
Nightmare
Rational
Ancient
Roots
Longer
Clear
Minus
Live
Square

More quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Image
But you can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. (The North)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
How do you know that nonsense isn't a good thing? If human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily precious could have come from it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest. But that's absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number? Then how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions are infinite.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
And why do you think that foolishness is bad? If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
We need writers who fear nothing. (Our Goal)
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
Love and hunger rule the world. Ergo, to rule the world, one must master love and hunger.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
Literature is painting, architecture, and music.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.... But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Image
Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.
Yevgeny Zamyatin