Авиатор Quotes

“I’m attempting to come closer to the past in various ways, in order to understand what it is. Is it separate from me or am I still living it, even now?”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“I looked at the governor and thought about how being near him caused me no agitation, the same as if his presence were televised. Yes, that’s the exact comparison: the object of observation is nearby and fully visible but there’s no contact with him: he’s on the other side of a screen.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“It is all very simple. There is crap in every person. When your crap comes into resonance with others’ crap, revolutions, wars, fascism, and communism start ... And that resonance is not tied to a standard of living or form of rule. Or rather it may be tied to it, but not directly. What is notable: the good in others’ souls does not respond at the same speed as the crap.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“Genuine repentance, after all, is a return to the condition before the sin, a sort of way to overcome time. The sin does not disappear, though, and it remains as a former sin and – you won’t believe this – as a relief because it was repented. It exists and is destroyed, simultaneously.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“when things are located within the bounds of medicine – it is better, of course, to trust Germans.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“They showed me Munich. A beautiful city but its heart beats indifferently.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“The main thing is not to overvalue events as such. I do not think they come into being as something internally particular to a person. After all, they are not a soul that determines personality and is inseparable from the body during life. There is no inseparability in events. They do not compose a part of a person: to the contrary, a person becomes part of them.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“the framework of science is tighter-fitting than ever: it’s just poking into my ribs. Squeezing religious thought into me: that only He can help here.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“When God wishes, nature’s order is overcome. Platosha read to me out loud from the ‘Great Canon of Repentance’ and we discovered those amazing words for ourselves. No, not ‘amazing,’ that’s somehow too cheap for them. Words filled with joy and hope.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“Unlike the boy who had warned us, we were self-absorbed and had not noticed anything. Later in life, I have observed that solitary people sense more subtly and notice nearing changes before others.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“Are you proposing that I plead for you and not believe it can come true? Do you remember – it’s somewhere in Chekhov – about the priest who goes to plead for rain and brings an umbrella with him?”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“When it comes down to it, there just aren’t seasons here. There is a wintertime and a nonwintertime, and everything else is lacking in our part of the world.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“There are no longer beautiful marble gravestones here, the ones that stood in my childhood. I asked myself why those gravestones could have been needed: for reuse? For paving the streets? What happens to a people that ravages its own cemeteries? The same thing that happened to us.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“on”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“I imagined power and the ability to conquer being poured down my throat along with the champagne, and, most importantly, with these attributes, a certain special responsibility for the country that transforms a bureaucrat into a ruler so that the country’s business becomes his personal business and the country itself becomes a part of his own ‘I.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“one should not tell of the horrendous events in the camp after living through them: they are beyond the bounds of human experience and it may be better not to live at all after them.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“The conditions were terrible on this absolutely bare island, where the wind blew eternally, and many did not survive. I write that and now shadows that were once people wander along what I wrote. The words crumble to dust: they do not come together into people at all.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“The real terror will begin soon.’ ‘What?’ I inquired. ‘So this is unreal?’ ‘There’s no reason to be ironic. Two things are needed for real terror: society’s readiness and someone who will take charge. Society’s readiness is already there. There’s just one small thing missing.’ ‘And so who will take charge?’ Muromtsev was silent. ‘The strongest one. He once telephoned me, as you know. Well, then: his strength can be felt even over the telephone. It’s animal-like somehow, not human.’ I believed Muromtsev: he worked with rats.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“What he seems not to understand is that reality tires of pronouncements and then tends to evaporate from them.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“I was also thinking that if I were president, I would make the population of the Russian Federation play lotto in the evenings. Of everything that the authorities could undertake right now, that seems like the best thing.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“a photographic portrait includes your present and past and maybe the future, too. Irony, of course, is therapeutic, but sometimes –’ and here he straightens up and looks at me pensively ‘– there is no need to be ashamed of pathos because laughter has its own confines and is incapable of reflecting the sublime.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“Who, then, do I hate? If I feel all that for the him that was then, does that mean he is not dust? Perhaps Voronin became a part of me by remaining in my memory and I hate him within myself?”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“all the things that changes in government and the falls of empires do not wipe out. Whatever happens outside history is timeless, liberated.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“because it is morning. It is as quiet as in Paradise. For some reason I think it should be quiet in Paradise.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“It is a legitimate question because camp is hell, not so much for the bodily torture as for the dehumanization of many who land there. In order to prevent the remnants of what is human in oneself being destroyed, one must leave that hell for at least a time, if only mentally. To think about Paradise.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“monitoring the work of pavers. How they laid wooden hexagons in wood-block paving. How they poured tar on the cracks and spread sand. Wheels rode softly and noiselessly along pavement like this – softness is characteristic of wood; it is alive.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“suddenly realized in all clarity that the conception of right and not right had disappeared over several years or so. And of up and down, light and dark, human and beastly. Who would do the weighing, what would they weigh, and who needed that now, anyway? Only a sword remained”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“Geiger, I think, is a community-minded person. But I am not. A country is not my measure and neither, even, is a people. What I wanted to say is this: a person now, that’s a measure,”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“The sleep-deprived sat for a quick rest... and fell asleep. And froze, since sleep is no hindrance for death.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator

“Of course many of us died after that: a person has his limits. The fact that nobody was clinging to life any longer played a role, too: survival is difficult because once a person is seized by indifference, it is as if he is dying.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator