Bely Quotes & Sayings

People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts — Siri Hustvedt

We dance. Sweet, downcast, through-the-lashes-glances bely every beating she got at thirteen, every lash of the tongue from her dad at fourteen, every heroin high that let her out for awhile, every hour and day she had to be tough.

She is so natural and soft. Her shoulders are down, hips loose and swinging as we close together. I swear I'm growing chest hair just looking at her. I've been a boy in public before, but I've never seen her like this. That's it exactly; I haven't seen her at all, except in glimpses, in half-confessional role-play sex. And here she is - pressed tight against my chest, hips grinding against my crotch to the bass bump of the music. Her thigh along mine is electric heaven. Two drag queens cannot decide whether we are breeders or in drag. I stroke my mascara-made mustache at them - but none of it matters with hands in suede and the way she smiles. — Various

Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least what journalists term "great books," is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's "Ulysses"; Kafka's "Transformation"; Bely's "St. Petersburg," and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, "In Search of Lost Time. — Vladimir Nabokov

Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures. — Elisabeth Elliot

You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you. — Yogi Berra

In would rather die of passion than of boredom. — Vincent Van Gogh

Controlling mothers do not pass the baton to their son's new wife. — Laura Schlessinger

Son: Father, you are my father. You sired me. I have sired no one because I left the primordial. I left you, I studied, I suffered, and my visions were pure. Before me, my father, new horizons were opened.

Father: Yes, I am your father. I sired you and nowhere did I go. Where I was in the beginning, there I remained. I dwell in the old home, my estate is as it was. I spawned, I lived with your mother. Then I lived with peasant women and girls, spawning. I surrounded myself with chickens, roosters, turkeys. My poultry lay dozens of eggs a day. But I studied nothing, never did I suffer. My horizons remain the same, oh just the same. These spaces, ancient, veritably Russian, assembled around us are all - all just the same.

("Adam") — Andrei Bely

I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you. — C.S. Lewis

Soap, gloves, isolating patients, not reusing needles and quarantining the contacts of the ill - in theory it should be very easy to contain Ebola — Peter Piot

My life is measured into two distinct phases . . . BC is before cellulite and AC is for after cellulite. Sad but so true! — Various

The test of moral ideas is moral results. — Morton Blackwell

The Lindsey Graham via foreign policy is going to beat Rand Paul's libertarian view of foreign policy. It will beat Barack Obama's view of foreign policy. It will beat Hillary Clinton's view of foreign policy. — Lindsey Graham

He returned to his seat and sat down; the road is so long, so long; he had to get through these spaces where stations clustered about the track amidst the black night like some black coffin set with candles. He thought that minute was flying after minute, mile after mile, everything was moving - even he was moving - but to where?

("Adam") — Andrei Bely

Tahtahta-ha-ha' clattered the wheels. A lamp outside the window nodded to him. Another. A third. The lamps ceased to wink. Night without winking clung to the windows.

("Adam") — Andrei Bely

You've met our guards." He gestured at the silent cylindrical guide. "The secret warriors: the binja. — China Mieville

Adam Antonovich went out of the annex which as a child he had called the 'world.' Through the glass he shouted jokingly to his servant 'You are still in the "world" but I'm not in the world, I'm in Russia.'

The hunchbacked plains spread out on every side, Russian plains, eaten away by ravines, ancient, native, all - all just the same. 'With the mind, Russia cannot be embraced; she is a special case, one can only believe in Russia,' he thought...

("Adam") — Andrei Bely

Here you will find marvelous moustaches, which neither pen nor brush could depict. To which the best part of a lifetime has been devoted, objects of long vigils by day and midnight; moustaches on which the most ravishing ointments have been poured, which have been anointed with the most precious pomades and which are the envy of passerby.. — Andrei Bely

People as such do not exist: they are all 'things conceived — Andrei Bely

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms. — Mirra Ginsburg

People who're nuts never doubt their own sanity. (The Killer's Cousin) — Nancy Werlin

The Millennium Stadium thing was for the Tsunami concert. It was a thing that I think every band in the country would have liked to be a part of at the time that it happened. — Kelly Jones

Once [the Senator's] brain has come into play with the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really does exist: he will not disappear from the Petersburg prospects while a senator with such thoughts exists, because thought, too, exists.

And so let our stranger be a real live stranger! And let my stranger's two shadows be real live shadows!

Those dark shadows will follow, they will follow on the stranger's heels, in the same way as the stranger himself will directly follow the senator; the aged senator will pursue you, he will pursue you, too, reader, in his black carriage: and from this day forth you will never forget him! — Andrei Bely

Adam Antonovich's father was a tubby tyrant with a triple chin and chinks where his eyes should have been. All his life he had amassed money. In old age he had exchanged it for space; his estates grew, grew and swelled.

("Adam") — Andrei Bely

Just as today science recognizes the constant recurrence of simple, tiny atomic particles in all sort of organized matter, our ancestors had the intuition that there was a secret rhythm in Nature which was the same in every single natural manifestation. A crane dance must mirror star dances, and human dance is an alphabet to decipher the unknown. — Pippa Pralen

Possible ways of attempting to distinguish counselling from psychotherapy include: that psychotherapy deals more with mental disorders than counselling; that psychotherapy is longer-term and deeper; and that psychotherapy is predominantly associated with medical settings. However, matters are by no means this clear-cut. Many counsellors work in medical settings, have helpees with recognized mental disorders, and do longer-term work that may or may not be of a deep psychodynamic nature. — Richard Nelson-Jones