Ilya Ehrenburg Quotes

“Memory retains some things and discards others. I remember every detail of some scenes from my childhood and adolescence, by no means the most important ones. I remember some people and have totally forgotten others. Memory is like the headlights of a car at night, which fall now on a tree, now on a hut, now on a man. People (usually writers) who tell the story of their lives as a continuous and detailed whole generally fill in the gaps with conjecture; it is hard to tell where genuine reminiscence ends and the novel begins.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“It is difficult to uproot fully grown plants; they become diseased and often perish. In Russia now they practise winter transplanting: a tree is dug up while it is in a dormant condition. In spring it comes back to life in a new place. A good method, especially as a tree has no memory.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“To sit indoors was silly. I postponed the search for Savchenko and Ludmila till the next day and went wandering about Paris. The men wore bowlers, the women huge hats with feathers. On the café terraces lovers kissed unconcernedly - I stopped looking away. Students walked along the boulevard St. Michel. They walked in the middle of the street, holding up traffic, but no one dispersed them. At first I thought it was a demonstration - but no, they were simply enjoying themselves. Roasted chestnuts were being sold. Rain began to fall. The grass in the Luxembourg gardens was a tender green. In December! I was very hot in my lined coat. (I had left my boots and fur cap at the hotel.) There were bright posters everywhere. All the time I felt as though I were at the theatre.

I have lived in Paris off and on for many years. Various events, snatches of conversation have become confused in my memory. But I remember well my first day there: the city electrified my. The most astonishing thing is that is has remained unchanged; Moscow is unrecognizable, but Paris is still as it was. When I come to Paris now, I feel inexpressibly sad - the city is the same, it is I who have changed. It is painful for me to walk along the familiar streets - they are the streets of my youth. Of course, the fiacres, the omnibuses, the steam-car disappeared long ago; you rarely see a café with red velvet or leather settees; only a few pissoirs are left - the rest have gone into hiding underground. But these, after all, are minor details. People still live out in the streets, lovers kiss wherever they please, no one takes any notice of anyone. The old houses haven't changed - what's another half a century to them; at their age it makes no difference. Say what you will, the world has changed, and so the Parisians, too, must be thinking of many things of which they had no inkling in the old days: the atom bomb, mass-production methods, Communism. But with their new thoughts they still remain Parisians, and I am sure that if an eighteen-year-old Soviet lad comes to Paris today he will raise his hands in astonishment, as I did in 1908: "A theatre!”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“A pity we hadn't had time to say all the things we wanted to each other.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“To sit indoors was silly. I postponed the search for Savchenko and Ludmila till the next day and went wandering about Paris. The men wore bowlers, the women huge hats with feathers. On the café terraces lovers kissed unconcernedly - I stopped looking away. Students walked along the boulevard St. Michel. They walked in the middle of the street, holding up traffic, but no one dispersed them. At first I thought it was a demonstration - but no, they were simply enjoying themselves. Roasted chestnuts were being sold. Rain began to fall. The grass in the Luxembourg gardens was a tender green. In December! I was very hot in my lined coat. (I had left my boots and fur cap at the hotel.) There were bright posters everywhere. All the time I felt as though I were at the theatre.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“I left with a heavy heart and a still heavier suitcase--I had filled it with my favourite books.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“I knew that people lived badly, remembered the barracks of the Khamovniki brewery, had seen flophouses, all-night cafés, drunkards, cruel and ignorant people, prison. But all that had been from the outside, and in the courtroom I caught a glimpse of people's hearts.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“In peaceful times in a peaceful country a man grows up, goes to school, marries, works, suffers illnesses, grows old. He may go through the whole of life without understanding what freedom is. No doubt he always feels free to the extent to which it is proper for a respectable citizen with average powers of imagination to be free.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“I can't listen to music often. It plays on my nerves; it makes me want to say silly, tender things and stroke the heads of people who, living in a dirty hell, can yet create such beauty.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“I knew that people lived badly, remembered the barracks of the Khamovniki brewery, had seen flophouses, all-night cafés, drunkards, cruel and ignorant people, prison. But all that had been from the outside, and in the courtroom I caught a glimpse of people's hearts. Why had that quiet, modest peasant woman brutally murdered her next-door neighbour? Why had this old man stabbed to death the stepdaughter with whom he lived? Why did people have faith in this pock-marked ugly miracle-worker? Why were they full of darkness, prejudice, violent passions which they themselves could not understand?”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“The epithet "monolithic" is often used as a term of praise in this country; but a monolith is a mass of stone. Human beings are far more complex.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“Everyone was searching for something, conducting lively arguments, getting excited, but behind it all one felt weariness, disillusion, emptiness.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“They say that sometimes a man cannot recognize himself in a looking-glass. It is even harder to recognize oneself in the clouded mirror of the past.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“In winter we often met in cafés and threw pennies into the bellies of noisy automatic barrel organs so that the sound of the music should drown our discussions. In the cafés we got sausage cut into cubes and forks with broken prongs; the sausage stank so badly that even mustard didn't help. We munched our sugar instead of putting it into the tea and broke pieces off the sugar loaf with black tongs. The cafés were noisy but not gay; people came in to get warm, and the harsh misery of home did not forsake them.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“Bryusoc wrote: "Time to admit it--I'm not young; my fortieth year soon..."

Nadya wrote: "But when I was about to go home alone I suddenly noticed that you were no longer young, that your right temple was almost grey, and I was so sorry I felt cold."

Those lines were written in the autumn of 1913, and on November 27 Nadya committed suicide. She had been translating some poems by Jules Laforgue, who wrote about the unbearable boredom of sSundays; in one of his poems a schoolgirl throws herself into the river for no known reason. Bryusov often used to talk about suicide; one of his poems had as its epigraph the words from Tyutchev: "Who, in the excess of feeling, when the blood boils and freezes, has not known your temptations--Suicide and Love?" And Nadya shot herself.

In the preface to the posthumous edition of her book I read: " In Lvova's life there were no significant external events." Dear Lord, how many events do there have to be in a person's life? At fifteen Nadya became an underground worker, at sixteen she was arrested, at nineteen she began to write poetry, at twenty-two she realized: "I'm only a poetess" - and shot herself. I'd have said that was enough.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life

“Today, far continents have become suburbs. Even the moon has somehow come closer. But for all that, the past has not lost its power, and if within a lifetime a man changes his skin an infinite number of times--almost as often as his suits--still he does not change his heart: he has but one.”
― Ilya Ehrenburg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Selections from People, Years, Life