Louise, something in me tightens when an American intellectual's eyes shine, and they start to talk to me about the Russian people.... Something in me says, Watch it, a new version of Irish Catholicism is being offered for your faith.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, river...s grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An enormously vast field lies between "God exists" and "there is no God." The truly wise man traverses it with great difficulty. A... Russian knows one or the other of these two extremes, but is not interested in the middle ground. He usually knows nothing, or very little.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expans...es are so great that the little man hasn't the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the ta...ble, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the phil...osopher's stone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not believe I am exaggerating in affirming that the empire of Russia is a country whose inhabitants are the most miserable on... earth, because they suffer at one and the same time the evils of barbarism and of civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...the worst horror of the Russian Revolution was the letting loose of one hundred million orators, for their passion for talk was... immediately responsible for all the other horrors ...Oratory prevented Russia from becoming a constitutional country. Oratory tore the Revolution from the patriots and gave it into the bloody hands of the mob. Oratory murdered the Czar, his wife, and their innocent children. Oratory almost wiped out the educated classes. Oratory held the stupid populace spellbound while the Germans invaded the country, boosted Lenine [sic] into power, and paved the way for the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. I never want to hear any more oratory as long as I live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although I had been scribbling in English all my literary life in the margin, so to say, of my Russian writings, [Despair] was my ...first serious attempt (not counting a wretched poem in a Cambridge University review, circa 1920) to use English for what may be loosely termed an artistic purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Leonid Ivanovich Shigaev is dead.... The suspension dots, customary in Russian obituaries, must represent the footprints of words ...that have departed on tiptoe, in reverent single file, leaving their tracks on the marble....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »