Vasily Quotes

#1. Vasily chortled. "What a diplomat you've become! You've a most refreshing way about you. Given time, I have no doubt that, despite your humble antecedents, you will learn to conduct yourself with the restraint and elegance of a noblewoman."
"You mean I'll learn to shut up?

Leigh Bardugo

#2. Do you often wonder," she continued, desperately hoping her questions would win Vasily over, "what might have been had his gaze fallen upon some other miserable wretch? Yes, you would have been destitute, starving in the streets, scraping for your next meal ... but even beggars are free.

Melika Dannese Lux

#3. Always remember this ... there is only ONE recipe for strength. A secret recipe that was handed down from Sandow to John Grimek to Paul Anderson to Vasily Alexeev to Bill Kazmaier to me. Now I'm giving you that magical recipe ... hard work plus proper nutrition plus time equals strong.

Steve Pulcinella

#4. Vasily laughed. "I can't decide if you're a fearmonger or a coward."
"And I can't decide if you're an idiot or an idiot.

Leigh Bardugo

#5. 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

#6. Every German soldier must be made to feel that he is living under the muzzle of a Russian gun.

Vasily Chuikov

#7. 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

#8. The world of the human soul suddenly seemed so vast as to make even the raging war seen insignificant.

Vasily Grossman

#9. The country had seen mighty tractors and skyscrapers...There was only one thing Russia had not seen during this thousand years: freedom.

Vasily Grossman

#10. 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

#11. Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

Vasily Grossman

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. My fascination for studies proved highly beneficial, it assisted the development of my aesthetic understanding of chess, and improved my endgame play.

Vasily Smyslov

#15. 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

#16. The first chess book that I read was Dufresne's self-tutor, published with Lasker's Common Sense in Chess as an appendix.

Vasily Smyslov

#17. I have frequently stated that I regard chess as an art form, where creativity prevails over other factors.

Vasily Smyslov

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. I don't believe in your "Good". I believe in human kindness.

Vasily Grossman

#22. The battle of Kursk ... the forcing of the Dnieper ... and the liberation of Kiev, left Hitlerite Germany facing catastrophe.

Vasily Chuikov

#23. Yes, everything flows, everything changes, it's impossible to step twice into the same transport.

Vasily Grossman

#24. 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

#25. Humanity will live as long as there are humans.

Vasily Grossman

#26. Despite the development of chess theory, there is much that remains secret and unexplored in chess.

Vasily Smyslov

#27. In chess, as in life, a man is his own most dangerous opponent.

Vasily Smyslov

#28. My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, for all the science and sport involved in it.

Vasily Smyslov

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Fascism will perish for the very reason that it has applied to man the laws applicable to atoms and cobblestones!

Vasily Grossman

#35. The heavy casualties, the constant retreat, the shortage of food and munitions, the difficulty of receiving reinforcements ... all this had a very bad effect on morale. Many longed to get across the Volga, to escape the hell of Stalingrad.

Vasily Chuikov

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. All religions will pass but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking into the distance.

Vasily Rozanov

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. No fantasy, however rich, no technique, however masterly, no penetration into the psychology of the opponent, however deep, can make a chess game a work of art, if these qualities do not lead to the main goal - the search for truth.

Vasily Smyslov

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. Magdey pledged to strip Ustar of any loot not only from the current raid but from several forthcoming ones as well. All

Vasily Mahanenko

#48. He was endowed with the extraordinary powers of endurance characteristic of madmen and simpletons.

Vasily Grossman

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Freedom is the direct opposite of necessity; freedom is necessity overcome.

Vasily Grossman

#52. Look everywhere with your eyes; but with your soul never look at many things, but at one.

Vasily Rozanov

#53. There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.

Vasily Grossman

#54. 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

#55. I've realized now that hope almost never goes together with reason. It's something quite irrational and instinctive.

Vasily Grossman

#56. The Ruy Lopez occupied a constant place in my opening repertoire. In it is reflected the classical interpretation of the problem of the centre.

Vasily Smyslov

#57. At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.

Vasily Grossman

#58. Sports became a favorite subject of reflection and will soon be the only way of thinking

Vasily Klyuchevsky

#59. 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

#60. In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good.

Vasily Grossman

#61. With a rumble and a roar, an iron curtain is descending on Russian history.

Vasily Rozanov

#62. 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

#63. A considerable role in the forming of my style was played by an early attraction to study composition.

Vasily Smyslov

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. The law fights against life, and life fights against the law.

Vasily Grossman

#67. He who fox-like got his rank, Is wolf-like in his office.

Vasily Zhukovsky

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. They came up with a table of pictures of all the shapes of UFOs that have ever been recorded -about fifty ... The study of UFOs may reveal some new forms of energy to us,or at least bring us closer to a solution.

Vasily Alekseyev

#71. In the blank wall of the world's indifference there had appeared a tiny snakelike fissure

Vasily Grossman

#72. I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

Vasily Grossman

#73. In my opinion, the style of a player should not be formed under the influence of any single great master.

Vasily Smyslov

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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