Odessa Stories Quotes

“No one responds to the newness of new things like children.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Consider this: Could it be true that, in all Russian literature, there isn’t a single clear and joyous depiction of the sun?”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“I watched the hoops of other people’s happiness roll past me.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“I imagined myself in the Jewish Self-Defence League,”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Life is rubbish,” he muttered. “The world’s a bordello. People are swindlers…”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Вышла огромная ошибка, тётя Песя. Но разве со стороны бога не было ошибкой поселить евреев в России, чтобы они мучились, как в аду? И чем было бы плохо, если бы евреи жили в Швейцарии, где их окружали бы первоклассные озёра, гористый воздух и сплошные французы? Ошибаются все, даже бог”
― Isaac Babel, How It Was Done in Odessa

“He was murdered in Stalin’s purges in 1940, at the age of 45.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“ISAAC BABEL was a short-story writer, playwright, literary translator and journalist.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Yes, sir,” answered the boatswain, a pillar of red meat overgrown with red hair.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“And I believe the Russian people will soon be drawn to the south, to the sea and the sun.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Gorky is a forerunner—the most powerful in our time.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“And have you ever run across a bright and enlivening sun in Gogol—a man from Ukraine?”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“In Odessa, luftmenschen skulk around coffee shops, looking to earn a rouble and feed their families, but there’s no work to be had—and what kind of work could there be for a useless luftmensch?”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“While some distance from the wide sea, smoke rises from factories and Karl Marx does his usual work.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Cocaine did him in, or morphine—did him in, they say, after he fell from an aeroplane somewhere in the marshes around Novgorod.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“The Odessan is the polar opposite of the Petrogradian. As a rule, Odessans make a killing in Petrograd.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“philoprogenitive because loving your kids is just the right thing to do.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“ODESSA IS A NASTY PLACE. Everybody knows that.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Shuffling her manly feet, shaking her head, she listed off—at the top of her voice, for the whole street to hear—the names of women who were happy with their husbands.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Youth isn’t the problem—it’ll pass with the years…”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Father would have reconciled himself to poverty, but he couldn’t do without glory.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“People would ask him what a Gobelin was, why the Jacobins had betrayed Robespierre, how rayon was manufactured, what made a section caesarean. Grandfather had all the answers.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Bolshoy Fontan (“Big Fountain”) is one of the largest and most popular coastal resort districts in Odessa.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“Langeron is a popular Odessan beach, named after Alexandre-Louis Andrault de Langeron (1763–1831), who served as mayor of Odessa from 1816 to 1820.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“hakol havel (Hebrew: “Vanity of vanities… All is vanity”): Ecclesiastes 12:8.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“The events in this story take place during the devastating Ukrainian famine of 1921–23, when more than a million people died of starvation and disease.”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories

“An innocent bachelor, he lived like a bird on a branch”
― Isaac Babel, Odessa Stories