Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes - Page 15

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

Which of us can control his feelings?

There is something predetermined in the mutual attraction between Germany and Russia. Otherwise, this attraction would not have survived two ghastly World Wars.

Still, everybody wants to eat.

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

If one is a professional soldier, it is part of one's job to die sooner or later.

Justness exists, even if few people exist who feel it.

I was always optimistic. And I held to and was guided by my views.

Why can't you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.

But what can you say in a letter?

I have always insisted on the need for local self-government for Russia, but I never opposed this model to Western democracy. On the contrary, I have tried to convince my fellow citizens by citing the examples of highly effective local self-government systems in Switzerland and New England, both of which I saw first-hand.

Some are bound to die young. By dying young a person stays young in people's memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time.

History is too slow for our life, for our hearts.

The one who pulls is the one they urge on.

There is eternal simplicity to a solution once it has been discovered!

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.

But nothing is all black in nature.

Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface - shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

A forest doesn't weep over one tree.

There is a law of time, a law of oblivion: glory to the dead; life to the living.

I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

... We brush aside all scales not our own, as if they were follies or delusions.

... but food eaten quickly isn't food.