I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, all lips. Some are pink and firmly round: a ring, a tender guardrail from the whole world. And then there are these ones: a second ago they weren’t here, and just now – like a knife-slit – they are here, still dripping sweet blood.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin Quotes

The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

We comes from God, I from the Devil.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

Don’t forget that we lawyers, we’re a higher breed of intellect, and so it’s our privilege to lie. It’s as clear as day. Animals can’t even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. There is no final revolution, no final number.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

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

Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that’s all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you’re afraid to look on the other side of that wall.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

All women are lips, nothing but lips.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The mighty power of logic cleanses all it touches.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox – the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Her smile was a bite, and I was its target.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Here I saw, with my own eyes, that laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter – even murder itself.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

Explosions are not comfortable.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

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

What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they’d nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.

— Yevgeny Zamyatin
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