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What is it to you if I don't want others to want for me, if I want to want myself - if I want the impossible.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

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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
Impossible
Others

More quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Literature is painting, architecture, and music.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment with an excellent toilet and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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And happiness...Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one...What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign — the divine minus.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow -- and judge today in the name of tomorrow.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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
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If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The most agonising thing is to drop doubt into a man about his being a reality, three-dimensional - and not some other kind of reality.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin