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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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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
Must
Tastes
Primitive
Poets
Idiotically
Absurd
Jostling
Inspired
Clumps
Poet
Untidy
Taste
Ancients
Another
Mist

More quotes by Yevgeny Zamyatin

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I prefer being wrong in my own way to being right in someone else's.
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I've read and heard a lot of unbelievable stuff about those times when people lived in freedom -- that is, in disorganized wildness.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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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.
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And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this once in a thousand years has come today.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth. We never think of it. But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox—the single most worthy path of the fearless mind . . . .
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
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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Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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At night numbers must sleep it is their duty, just as it is their duty to work in the daytime. Not sleeping at night is a criminal offense.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The myth about the angel who rebelled against his Lord is the most beautiful of all myths, the proudest, the most revolutionary, the most immortal of them all.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.
Yevgeny Zamyatin