Top 52 Vasily Grossman Quotes
#1. At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.
Vasily Grossman
#2. I've realized now that hope almost never goes together with reason. It's something quite irrational and instinctive.
Vasily Grossman
#3. And this man, who during three long decades had not once remembered that the world contains lilac bushes - and pansies, sandy garden paths, little carts with containers of fizzy water - this man gave a deep sigh, convinced now that life had gone on in his absence, that life had continued. (pg8)
Vasily Grossman
#4. There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.
Vasily Grossman
#5. Freedom is the direct opposite of necessity; freedom is necessity overcome.
Vasily Grossman
#6. Byerozkin knew very well that the man with no quiet at the bottom of his soul was unable to endure for long, however courageous he might be in combat. He thought of fear or cowardice, on the other hand, as something temporary, something that could be cured as easily as a cold.
Vasily Grossman
#7. And the greatest tragedy of our age is we don't listen to our consciences. We don't say what we think. We feel one thing and do another.
Vasily Grossman
#8. He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.
Vasily Grossman
#9. Both his voice and eyes had the burning cold of alcohol. His strength no longer lay in his military experience or his knowledge of the map, but in his harsh, impetuous soul.
Vasily Grossman
#10. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.
Vasily Grossman
#11. Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; throughout human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves.
Vasily Grossman
#12. I don't want you to be young and beautiful. I only want one thing. I want you to be kind-hearted - and not just towards cats and dogs.
Vasily Grossman
#13. The magic of the revolution had joined with people's fear of death, their horror of torture, their anguish when the first breath of the camps blew on their faces.
Vasily Grossman
#14. Informers and stool pigeons are full of virtue, they should all be released and sent home - but how vile they are! Vile for all their virtues, vile even with all their sins absolved...Who was it who made that cruel joke about the proud sound made by the word "Man"?
Vasily Grossman
#15. There was a cold wind out on the street. It picked up the dust, whirled it about and suddenly scattered it, flinging it down like black chaff. There was an implacable severity in the frost, in the branches that tapped together like bones, in the icy blue of the tram-lines.
Vasily Grossman
#16. There are one or two people - I'm not talking about family, about Zhenya or your mother - whom a pariah can trust. He can contact these people without first waiting for a sign.
Vasily Grossman
#17. I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.
Vasily Grossman
#18. In the blank wall of the world's indifference there had appeared a tiny snakelike fissure
Vasily Grossman
#19. Another fact that allowed Fascism to gain power over men was their blindness. A man cannot believe that he is about to be destroyed. The optimism of people standing on the edge of the grave is astounding.
Vasily Grossman
#20. The true champions of a nation's freedom are those who reject the limitations of stereotypes and affirm the rich diversity of human nature to be found.
Vasily Grossman
#21. The law fights against life, and life fights against the law.
Vasily Grossman
#22. Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed - while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.
Vasily Grossman
#23. Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.
Vasily Grossman
#24. The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom ... How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness.
Vasily Grossman
#25. In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good.
Vasily Grossman
#26. We leafed through a series of the [1941 Soviet] Front newspaper. I came across the following phrase in a leading article: 'The much-battered enemy continued his cowardly advance.
Vasily Grossman
#27. I don't believe in your "Good". I believe in human kindness.
Vasily Grossman
#28. Ivan tells Anna: I used to imagine that being embraced by a woman ... as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everthing ... [But] happiness, it turns out, will be to share with you the burden I can't share with anyone else.
Vasily Grossman
#29. There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil - anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.
Vasily Grossman
#30. No one has the right to lead other people like sheep. That's something even Lenin failed to understand. The purpose of a revolution is to free people. But Lenin just said: In the past you were led badly, I'm going to lead you well.
Vasily Grossman
#31. Thousands of people are being buried and no one attends the funerals,' said one of the soldiers. 'In peacetime it's the other way round: one coffin and a hundred people carrying flowers.
Vasily Grossman
#32. The most fundamental change in people at this time was a weakening of their sense of individual identity; their sense of fate grew correspondingly stronger.
Vasily Grossman
#33. It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one's eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished.
Vasily Grossman
#34. Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.
Vasily Grossman
#35. The longer a nation's history, the more wars, invasions, wanderings, and periods of captivity it has seen-the greater the diversity of its faces.
Vasily Grossman
#36. The country had seen mighty tractors and skyscrapers...There was only one thing Russia had not seen during this thousand years: freedom.
Vasily Grossman
#37. The world of the human soul suddenly seemed so vast as to make even the raging war seen insignificant.
Vasily Grossman
#38. Each wave breaking against the cliff would believe it was dying for the good of the sea; it would never occur to it that, like thousands of waves before and after, it had only been brought into being by the wind.
Vasily Grossman
#39. Time is a transparent medium. People and cities arise out of it, move through it and disappear back into it. It is time that brings them and time that takes them away.
Vasily Grossman
#40. No artist has painted
A true portrait of Lenin
Ages to come will complete
Lenin's unfinished portrait.
Did Poletaev understand the tragic implication of his lines about Lenin? (pg179)
Vasily Grossman
#41. A mountain had died, its skeleton had been scattered over the ground. Time had aged the mountain; time had killed the mountain-and here lay the mountain's bones.
Vasily Grossman
#42. In the cruel and terrible time in which our generation has been condemned to live on this earth, we must never make peace with evil. We must never become indifferent to others or undemanding of ourselves.
Vasily Grossman
#43. The intuition of a deafened and isolated soldier often turns out to be nearer the truth than judgements delivered by staff officers as they study the map.
Vasily Grossman
#44. Stalin's hatred for the Old Bolsheviks who opposed him was also a hatred for those aspects of Lenin's character that contradicted what was most essential in Lenin.
Vasily Grossman
#45. Fascism will perish for the very reason that it has applied to man the laws applicable to atoms and cobblestones!
Vasily Grossman
#46. When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?
Vasily Grossman
#47. Yes, everything flows, everything changes, it's impossible to step twice into the same transport.
Vasily Grossman
#48. She's got legs like a stork, no arse worth speaking of, and great cow-like eyes. call that a woman?' 'You just like big tits', chentsov retorted. 'That's an outmoded, pre-revolutionary point of view
Vasily Grossman
#49. What's really terrifying is when you realize that bureaucracy isn't simply a growth on the body of the State. If it were only that, it could be cut off. No, bureaucracy is the very essence of the State.
Vasily Grossman
#50. He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.
Vasily Grossman
#52. He was dimly aware that if you wish to remain a human being under Fascism, there is an easier option than survival
death.
Vasily Grossman
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