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“Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?”
“Who is the convict’s worst enemy? Another convict.”
A stoolie will always get by, whoever else bleeds for him.
There are two ends to a stick, and there’s more than one way of working. If it’s for human beings—make sure and do it properly. If it’s for the big man—just make it look good.
The Russians don’t even remember which hand you cross yourself with.
Apart from sleep, an old lag can call his life his own only for ten minutes at breakfast time, five at lunchtime, and five more at suppertime.
Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?
The other half, saved from breakfast, he thought of eating there and then, but food swallowed in a hurry is food wasted, you feel no fuller and it does nothing for you.
A convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place, worry over the same thing continually.
Writing letters now was like throwing stones into a bottomless pool. They sank without trace. No point in telling the family which gang you worked in and what your foreman, Andrei Prokofyevich Tyurin, was like. Nowadays you had more to say to Kildigs, the Latvian, than to the folks at home.
In jail and in the camps Shukhov had lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family from day to day or year to year. The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier. But what would it be like when he got out?
Your foreman matters more than anything else in a prison camp: a good one gives you a new lease of life, a bad one can land you six feet under.
One look at the whip is enough for a beaten dog! The cold was fierce, but the foreman was fiercer.
Who is the convict’s worst enemy? Another convict. If zeks didn’t squabble among themselves, the bosses would have no power over them.
For the moment that ladleful means more to him than freedom, more than his whole past life, more than whatever life is left to him.
The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.
