The Doomed City Quotes

“Есть я, нет меня, сражаюсь я, лежу на диване — никакой разницы. Ничего нельзя изменить, ничего нельзя исправить. Можно только устроиться — лучше или хуже. Все идёт само по себе, а я здесь ни при чем. Вот оно — ваше понимание, и больше понимать мне нечего… Вы мне лучше скажите, что я с этим пониманием должен делать?”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Град обреченный

“Приходя не радуйся, уходя не грусти.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Град обреченный

“Великий стратег был более, чем стратегом. Стратег всегда крутится в рамках своей стратегии. Великий стратег отказался от всяких рамок. Стратегия была лишь ничтожным элементом его игры, она была для него так же случайна, как для Андрея -- какой-нибудь случайный, по прихоти сделанный ход. Великий стратег стал великим именно потому, что понял (а может быть, знал от рождения): выигрывает вовсе не тот, кто умеет играть по всем правилам; выигрывает тот, кто умеет отказаться в нужный момент от всех правил, навязать игре свои правила, неизвестные противнику, а когда понадобится -- отказаться и от них. Кто сказал, что свои фигуры менее опасны, чем фигуры противника? Вздор, свои фигуры гораздо более опасны, чем фигуры противника. Кто сказал, что короля надо беречь и уводить из-под шаха? Вздор, нет таких королей, которых нельзя было бы при необходимости заменить каким-нибудь конем или даже пешкой. Кто сказал, что пешка, прорвавшаяся на последнюю горизонталь, обязательно становится фигурой? Ерунда, иногда бывает гораздо полезнее оставить ее пешкой -- пусть постоит на краю пропасти в назидание другим пешкам...”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Град обреченный

“Вами двигали жалость, милосердие и тэ-дэ и тэ-пэ. Я же не об этом. Жалеть женщин и детей, плачущих от голода, - это нетрудно, это всякий умеет. А вот сумеете вы пожалеть здоровенного сытого мужика с таким вот, - Изя показал, - половым органом? Изнывающего от скуки мужика? Денни Ли, по-видимому, умел, а вы сумеете?”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Град обреченный

“The lack of understanding produced a lack of belief. And the lack of belief meant death. Very, very dangerous. The Mentor had told him bluntly: the essential thing was to believe in the idea to the very end, unconditionally. To realize that not understanding anything was an absolutely indispensable condition of the Experiment.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“Take myths, for instance! As we know, fools are the overwhelming majority, which means that the witness to any interesting event has generally been a fool. Ergo: a myth is a description of a real event as perceived by a fool and refined by a poet. eh?”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Град обреченный

“Никому я не нужен, и никто никому не нужен.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Град обреченный

“This isn’t Earth, it’s not a sphere . . . There isn’t any oil here, there isn’t any water, there aren’t any large settlements . . . And there isn’t any Anticity—of course not, that’s absolutely clear now; no one here has ever even heard of it . . . Anyway, the excuses can be found. Excuses . . . That’s just it. They’re excuses!”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“strange question . . .” he mumbled as he did it. “What answer can I give them, I ask you? I’d like to know what answer I’m supposed to give them. How do I know?” “That is, you don’t give them any answer?” “But what answer can I give them? What? I tell them the boss knows best.” “What an answer!” said Izya, glaring horrendously. “With answers like that you can demoralize an entire army, never mind the poor drivers . . . ‘Well guys, I’m ready to go back right now, only the big bad boss won’t let me . . .’ Do you even understand why we’re making this journey? You’re a volunteer, aren’t you—no one forced you to come!”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“Well, great writers are always grouching too. It’s their normal condition, because they are society’s sick conscience, although society doesn’t have the slightest suspicion that they even exist. And since in this case you are the symbol of society, you’ll be the first one they start throwing tin cans at.” Izya”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“The Anticity exists. There isn’t any desert of ice, or if there is, it can be crossed. There’s a city, exactly like ours, but what goes on there, we don’t know, and what they want there—we don’t know that either. But they say, for instance, that everything there is the other way round. When things are good for us here, things are bad for them there . .”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“And anyway, do you know what I think?” he said thoughtfully. “As soon as society has solved some problem that it has, it immediately comes face-to-face with a new problem of the same magnitude . . . no, of even greater magnitude.” Then he livened up. “And that, by the way, gives rise to an interesting little point. Eventually society will come face-to-face with problems of such complexity that it will be beyond mankind’s power to solve them. And then so-called progress will stop.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“And then, note, there’s no such thing as completely contented people. There’s something everyone wants that he doesn’t have, right? You know, he’s quite happy with everything, but then he doesn’t have a car.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“Infinite Void to the west and infinite Solidity to the east. It was absolutely impossible to comprehend these two infinities. You could only grow accustomed to them. Those who couldn’t grow accustomed to them, who simply didn’t know how, tried not to come to the Cliff, so it was a rare thing to meet anyone here. Nowadays lovebirds were pretty much the only ones who came out here, and mostly at night. At night something in the Abyss glowed with a weak, greenish light, as if down there in the depths something was slowly rotting, century by century. This glow gave the black, ragged cliff edge a clearly defined outline, and everywhere here the grass was incredibly tall and”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“Everyone felt strange on the cliff top. And apparently everyone got the same feeling here—that the world, if you looked at it from this spot, was clearly divided into two equal halves. Looking to the west, there was a boundless, blue-green void—not sea, and not even sky, but precisely a void of a bluish-greenish color. Blue-green Nothing. To the east, towering up vertically and blotting out the sky, was an unbounded expanse of solid yellow, with a narrow protruding terrace, along which the City stretched. The Yellow Wall. A solid, yellow Firmament.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“Life goes on, doesn’t it, regardless of some Fritz Heiger or other? If you’re disenchanted with the Experiment, then think about the struggle for life . . .” “The struggle for survival,” Andrei said with a crooked grin. “What sort of life is there now?” “That will depend on you.” “And on you?” “Not much depends on us. There are many of you. We don’t decide everything here, you do.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“And Andrei carried on agonizingly trying to understand what sort of game this was that he was playing, what its purpose was, what the rules were, and why all this was happening, and he was transfixed to the depths of his soul by the question: How had he become the adversary of the Great Strategist—he, a faithful soldier in the Strategist’s army, prepared at any moment to die for him, prepared to kill for him, not knowing any other goals except his goals, not believing in any means except the means indicated by him, not distinguishing the plans of the Great Strategist from the plans of the Universe? He greedily gulped down the champagne, without tasting anything at all, and then suddenly he was overwhelmed by a blinding flash of insight. But of course, he wasn’t an adversary”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“Izya Katzman had once remarked concerning this business that a city of a million people, deprived of any systematic ideology, would inevitably acquire its own myths.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“We think too much of ourselves, that’s what, he thought. The Experiment is all well and good, but everyone insists on doing things his own way, clings to his own position, and we have to do it together, together!”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“To realize that not understanding anything was an absolutely indispensable condition of the Experiment. That was the hardest part, naturally. The majority here had no real ideological toughness, no genuine certainty that the bright future was inevitable. That no matter how tough and difficult things might be today, and tomorrow as well, the day after tomorrow the star-spangled sky will surely unfurl above our heads, and life will be bright and festive . . .”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“The Experiment is the Experiment. Of course we don’t understand anything. But then, we’re not supposed to understand! That’s a fundamental condition! If we understood what the baboons are for, what the switching around of professions is for . . . that understanding would immediately condition our behavior, the Experiment’s integrity would be compromised, and it would fail.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“It’s just that I have this strange sort of feeling . . . All these baboons, the transformation of the water, the general bedlam day after day . . . One fine day they’ll hand us a confusion of tongues too . . . It seems like they’re systematically preparing us for some appalling kind of world that we’re going to live in henceforth, now and forever, and unto the ages of ages. It’s like at Okinawa. I was just a little kid then, the war was going on, and the Okinawa boys and girls like me were forbidden to speak their own dialect. Nothing but Japanese. And when they caught some kid, they hung a sign around his neck: I DON’T KNOW HOW TO TALK PROPERLY. And he walked around with that sign.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“What I think, though, is this,” said Uncle Yura. “The Mentors aren’t real human beings. They’re, how can I put it . . . a different species, I suppose . . . They’ve planted us in a fish tank . . . or something like a zoological garden . . . and they’re watching to see what happens.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“The intelligentsia is altogether impotent!” Andrei declared bitterly. “A lickspittle social stratum. It serves whoever holds the power.” “A gang of wimps,” barked Fritz. “Wimps and blabbermouths, an eternal source of slackness and disorganization!”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“Think about it: who needs professional training in a city where everyone is constantly changing his profession?”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“You’re here, and that means you’re our comrade. Work well, and we’ll be good friends. And you’ll have to work well. Being here, you know, it’s like being in the army: if you don’t know how, we’ll teach you; if you don’t want to, we’ll make you!” He liked the way he was speaking very much—it was so distinctly reminiscent of the speeches given by Lyosha Baldaev, the leader of the Communist Youth League group in his faculty at the university, before the unpaid working Saturdays.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“This person needed help. Andrei had already seen plenty of new arrivals in this place. “The same thing as everyone else, that’s what you’ll do. You’ll go to the labor exchange, fill out a record card, drop it in the slot”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“He had never seen a farmer before in all the time he had spent in the City, although he had heard a lot about these people—supposedly they were dour folk and a bit on the wild and weird side. They lived far away in wild places, where they waged a harsh struggle against swamps and jungles, they only drove into the City to sell the produce from their farms, and unlike the City people, they never changed their profession.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“Andrei walked over to Fritz and asked in a low voice, “Well, what are we going to do?” “Fuck knows,” Fritz said rancorously. “If only we had a flamethrower . . .” “Maybe we could bring some bricks?”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City

“Remember, you used to keep quizzing me, asking how come—people of different nationalities, all speaking the same language and not even suspecting a thing. Remember how it astounded you, how perplexed you were, how you tried to prove to Kensi that he was speaking Russian, and Kensi tried to prove to you that you were speaking Japanese, remember? But now you’ve gotten used to it—those questions don’t even occur to you any longer. It’s one of the conditions of the Experiment. The Experiment is the Experiment, what else can I tell you?” He smiled. “Right, off you go, Andrei, off you”
― Arkady Strugatsky, The Doomed City