When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.
But what depths of enforced ignorance were achieved by the monstrous lies of the state. Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of the truth into which our own snout has blundered.
So leave envy to those who always think the radish in the other fellow’s hand is bigger than yours.
We like to take our anger out on those who are weaker, those who cannot answer. It is a human trait. And somehow the arguments to prove we are right appear out of nowhere.
The time in which we live has unfathomable depths beneath it. Our age is a mere film on the surface of time.
Given that interrogations had ceased to be an attempt to get at the truth, for the interrogators in difficult cases they became a mere exercise of their duties as executioners and in easy cases simply a pastime and a basis for receiving a salary.
L. Kopelev came back to Moscow in 1955 and made a discovery: ‘I am I’ll-at-ease with successful people! I keep up acquaintance only with those of my friends who are in some way unlucky.’ But, then, only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
Vera always seemed to be in a hurry, but when she got into a bus she would sit herself down as comfortably as possible on the broken springs of the seat, or else reach out for a strap, hang onto it and think to herself, “I don’t want to do anything.” In spite of common sense she knew that she merely had to kill the hours of the evening, then hurry back to work the next morning in an identical bus.
Abakumov was cleverer than Yakonov supposed. It was just that prolonged lack of exercise had rendered the minister’s brain useless to him.
Easy money had no weight: you didn’t feel you’d earned it. What you get for a song you won’t have for long, the old folks used to say, and they were right.
No zek had the right to stay one second in his workroom without the supervision of a free employee because prudence dictated that the prisoner would be bound to use that unsupervised second to break into the steel safe with a lead pencil, photograph its secret documents with a trouser button, explode an atom bomb, and fly to the moon.
There are questions on which a definite opinion has been established, and they are no longer open to discussion.
No one on this earth ever says anything ‘once and for all.’ If they did, life would come to a stop and succeeding generations would have nothing to say.
He read as a hare or a kangaroo hops, barely touching the ground, carrying off crumbs of soil on its paws.
He was condemned precisely because he prospered so well, he had no desire to risk his life, to defend the good life.
In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice.
Truth, it seems, is always bashful, easily reduced to silence by the too blatant encroachment of falsehood.
The man from whom you’ve taken everything is no longer in your power; he is free again.
Erano queste le nostre camere della morte. Ci mancava il gas per fare le camere a gas.
This was happiness. To go nowhere, ask for nothing, want nothing, just to stand there the whole night through, blissfully, blessedly, as trees stand, catching the snowflakes on his upturned face.
Sa traiesti intr-o cusca cu cinci etaje, unde se umbla si se bocane deasupra capului tau, iar radioul urla din toate partile – e considerat un lucru tare bun. Iar sa traiesti ca un lucrator harnic al pamantului, intr-o bojdeuca lipita cu lut, la marginea stepei – se considera o mare nesansa.