Blok Quotes & Sayings

The squeak of oarlocks comes over the lake water

A woman's shriek assaults the ear

While above, in the sky, inured to everything,

The moon looks on with a mindless leer

("The Unknown Lady") — Alexander Blok

Beauty is frightening," they will tell you -

Lazily you will arrange

A Spanish shawl on your shoulders,

A red rose in your hair.


"Beauty is simple," they will tell you -

Clumsily with a motley shawl

You will cover a child up,

A red rose on the floor.


But, distractedly heeding

All the words sounding around you,

Sadly lost in thought

You will say about yourself:


'I am neither frightening nor simple;

I am not so frightening, that I would simply

Kill; I am not so simple

That I do not know how frightening life is.'

("For Anna Akhmatova") — Alexander Blok

One can't live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us. — Philip G. Zimbardo

stars, Where did such anguish come from?" And the stars tell him, The stars tell him everything. — Alexander Blok

From sunset she appeared,

Her cloak pierced by a bloom

Of unfamiliar climes.


She summoned me somewhere

Into the northern gloom

And aimless winter ice.


And bonfire burned 'mid night,

And with its tongues the blaze

Did lick the very skies.


The eyes flashed fiery light,

And falling as black snakes

The tresses were released.


And then the snakes encircled

My mind and lofty spirit

Lay spread upon the cross.


And in the snowdust's swirl

To black eyes I am true,

To beauty of the coils.

(untitled: "From sunset she appeared") — Alexander Blok

The sinking of the Titanic has made me indescribably happy; there is, after all, an ocean. — Alexander Blok

The ground is my ocean, I'm the shark, and most people don't even know how to swim. — Carlos Machado

With your whole body, with your whole heart, with your whole conscience, listen to the Revolution ... This is the music everyone who has ears should hear. — Alexander Blok

I think it's an intellectual duty for a person who lives in a free society to read material not only with which you agree, but with which you disagree. Because every so often somebody you think is wrong will actually turn out to be right. — Tom Clancy

It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes. — Edvard Munch

How often we sit weeping - you
and I - over the life we lead!
My friends, if you only knew
the darknes of the days ahead! — Alexander Blok

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry - English, Russian and French - than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several - Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke - have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. — Vladimir Nabokov

Inside my soul a treasure is buried.

The key is mine and only mine.

How right you are, you drunken monster!

I know: the truth is in the wine.

("The Unknown Lady") — Alexander Blok

I also watched where he [Ted Cruz] did a forum that looked like it came right out of a government agency, and it said on top, "Voter Violation," and then it graded you and it scared the hell out of people, and it said the only way you clear up the violation, essentially, is to go and vote for Ted Cruz. I watched that fraudulent document, and I said it's the worst thing I've ever seen in politics. — Donald Trump

In time we all search for something to ease the confusion. Some find hope in a bottle and some find hope in a heart,
we are not to judge,
for we have never walked their path. — Nikki Rowe

I once stirred thunder in the skies, And now, unlike the days of yore - Just tears in a drunken poet's eyes And laughter - from some whore. — Alexander Blok

Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot. — Augustus William Hare

The mirror's light sparks in the eyes,

And horrified, my lids drawn tight,

I step back to that realm of night

Where not a single exit lies...

(Untitled: "I pass away this life of mine...") — Alexander Blok

It's not what you know-or when you see-that matters. It's about the journey. — Jessica Park

I never ask boys' opinions on clothes, ever. I really think, unless you think the guy has style, don't ask. So I only ask my girl friends. I don't trust guys' opinions on style! — Emma Roberts

Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun! — Alexander Blok

The testimony of scripture is so plain that to add anything were superfluous, were it not that the world is almost now come to that blindness, that whatsoever pleases not the princes and the multitude, the same is rejected as doctrine newly forged, and is condemned for heresy. — John Knox

Poor land, poor land, what do you mean
to the heart that moves in me?
Poor love, poor love, poor wife of mine,
why do you weep so bitterly?

(from Retribution book 2, I) — Alexander Blok

The bourgeois stands like a question mark,
Speechless, like the hungry cur,
The ancient world stands there behind him,
A mongrel dog, afraid to stir. — Alexander Blok

What message, years of conflagration, have you: madness or hope? On thin cheeks strained by war and liberation bloody reflections still remain. — Alexander Blok

You see, art makes people think. Blok didn't want people to think. If that happened, they might have realized what was actually happening. — D.J. MacHale

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore. — Denis Johnson

The brain is not an organ to be relied upon. — Alexander Blok

When rowan leaves are dank and rusting And rowan berries red as blood, When in my palm the hangman's thrusting The final nail with bony thud, When, over the foul flooding river, Upon the wet grey height, I toss Before my land's grim looks, and shiver As I swing here upon the cross, Then, through the blood and weeping, stretches My dying sight to space remote; I see upon the river's reaches Christ sailing to me in a boat. — Alexander Blok

The first move toward the determination of the direction of my art was the fortunate invention of plans for Blok's wonder The Puppet Show. — Vsevolod Meyerhold

It is as queen of Canada that I am here. Queen of Canada and all Canadians, not just one or two ancestral strains. — Queen Elizabeth II