Petersburg Quotes & Sayings

In the nineteenth century, cholera struck the most modern, prosperous cities in the world, killing rich and poor alike, from Paris and London to New York City and New Orleans. In 1836, it felled King Charles X in Italy; in 1849, President James Polk in New Orleans; in 1893, the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg. — Sonia Shah

I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed. — Colum McCann

The ultimate moment where I most felt like a rebel was in St. Petersburg, Russia [in 2012 during the MDNA Tour] when I was told they were going to arrest anyone who was openly or obviously gay and they came to my shows and I spoke out against the government. — Madonna Ciccone

illustrated magazine: Nekrasov, 'the people's poet' (see note 15), was a contributor to Spark, an illustrated satirical journal published in Petersburg from 1859 to 1873. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

The duality of St Petersburg and Leningrad remains. They are not even on speaking terms. — Joseph Wechsberg

It was in the hands of two ministers, one lady, and two Jews, and all these people, though the way had been paved already with them, Stepan Arkadyevitch had to see in Petersburg. — Leo Tolstoy

[ ... ] everything was going in regular caravans to the summer villas. It seemed as though Petersburg threatened to become a wilderness, so that at last I felt ashamed, mortified and sad that I had nowhere to go for the holidays and no reason to go away. I was ready to go away with every waggon, to drive off with every gentleman of respectable appearance who took a cab; but no one - absolutely no one - invited me — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The leader of the controversial Church of Scientology routinely physically attacked members of his management team, according to former executives, a Florida newspaper has reported. Defectors from the controversial organisation who spoke to the St Petersburg Times told the paper that David Miscavige was "constantly denigrating and beating on people". Mike Rinder, the church's spokesman for decades, said he was attacked by Miscavige some 50 times. — David Miscavige

Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won. — Alexander Alekhine

I am going to St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I'm sick of the job-it's a thankless one and full of grief. I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor. — Al Capone

belongs. I can't afford so much as a footman to scour Saint Petersburg." "You must afford it. It is said, 'One — Gregory Maguire

What do the hieroglyphs tell us of what it was like to live under the lash, building the pyramids? Do we talk of that? Do we? No, we talk of the magnificence and majesty of the Egyptians. Of the Romans. Of Saint Petersburg, and nothing of the bones of the hundred thousand slaves that it is built on. — Richard Flanagan

In his Petersburg world people were divided into two quite opposite sorts. One
the inferior sort: the paltry, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people who believe that a husband should live with the one wife to whom he is married, that a girl should be pure, a woman modest, and a man, manly, self controlled and firm; that one should bring up one's children to earn their living, should pay one's debts, and other nonsense of the kind. These were the old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another sort of people: the real people to which all his set belonged, who had above all to be well-bred, generous, bold, gay, and to abandon themselves unblushingly to all their passions and laugh at everything else. — Leo Tolstoy

Even Karenin, who might well have turned out to be a flat caricature with his stick-out ears and cracking knuckles, is endowed with a complex personality as the other characters see him differently on different occasions: when Anna sees him at the Petersburg station, when he is at his government desk, when his son recoils from his embrace, when he is at the interview with his divorce lawyer, when — Leo Tolstoy

I hadn't watched any of the Olympics, apart from the evening we arrived in St Petersburg. I figured why watch it, I'm doing it. — Mel Cormican

Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform the most natural and essential official duty - so familiar to everyone in the government service, though incomprehensible to outsiders - that duty, but for which one could hardly be in government service, of reminding the ministry of his existence - and having, for the due performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably spending his days at the races and in the summer villas. — Leo Tolstoy

Great music can come from anywhere around the globe. And there has always been a music business. It just wasn't recorded, nor was it centered in New York, London, Los Angeles or Nashville but rather St Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Milan and Paris. — Seymour Stein

It is apparent at first glance that in The Double there is more creative talent and depth of thought than in Poor Folk. But meanwhile the consensus of St. Petersburg readers is that this novel is intolerably long-winded and therefore terribly boring ... — Vissarion Belinsky

In his Petersburg world all people were divided into utterly opposed classes. One, the lower class, vulgar, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully married; that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to bring up one's children, earn one's bread, and pay one's debts; and various similar absurdities. This was the class of old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else. — Leo Tolstoy

In a city by the sea that was certainly never called anything so bourgeois as St. Petersburg, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. — Catherynne M Valente

Lord, but why don't you go to this lawyer yourself and tell him the whole business in private? They say he was invited from Petersburg for three thousand. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude - as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. — Charles C. Mann

Paris for lunch, dinner in St. Petersburg. — Wilhelm II

It turned out to be only our former chauffeur, Tsiganov, who had thought nothing of riding all the way from St. Petersburg, on buffers and freight cars, through the immense, frosty and savage expanse of revolutionary Russia, for the mere purpose of bringing us a very welcome sum of money sent us by good friends of ours. After a month's stay, Tsiganov declared the Crimean scenary bored him and departed
to go all the way back north, with a big bag over his shoulder, containing various articles which we would have gladly given him had we thought he coveted them (such as a tourser press, tennis shoes, a nigthshirt, an alarm clock, a flat iron, several other ridiculous things I have forgotten) and the absence of which only gradually came to light if not pointed out, with vindictive zeal, by an anemic servant girl whose pale charms he had also rifled. — Vladimir Nabokov

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, my wife speaks five languages: Russian, English, French, Italian and, out of self-defense, Spanish. I watched her learn Spanish in three months. — Cheech Marin

The Finns also have a bent for drink, even though there is no wine here whatsoever, except for illicit tavern keeping, which is harshly suppressed. But, all the way to St. Petersburg, the Finn will drink himself into forgetfulness, lose his money, horse, bridle, and return home poorer than a church rat. — Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

St. Petersburg is a wonderful city. You have wonderful parks, birds singing in the trees, manatees in the water, pelicans. So it's like this little paradise on Earth. — Bjarke Ingels

My family didn't have time for me, so I decided to join the Suvorov military academy, which is in St. Petersburg. I spent two years there and studied general military science. At that point, once I graduated, I joined the Chernigov higher education pilot academy. — Roman Romanenko

Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination ... — Joseph Brodsky

Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m'imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. "Monsieur Poe-poe," as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes in Paris called the poet-poet. — Vladimir Nabokov

For me, St. Petersburg is the city that I can never escape because it has this special energy, even a dark energy. It keeps pulling me back. — Anna Netrebko

A series of interlocking islands and bridges, with wide white-sand beaches on the green Gulf of Mexico and placid marinas on Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg was a place of stucco and sunshine, East Coast attitude and tropical rain, cheap gas and imported food. — Adam Skolnick

Petersburg, growing up at home, all by my family and friends, Petersburg really, city-raised me, you know everybody there. — Trey Songz

Hauntingly active as they share space with the living, the dead refuse to give up their undead residency. — Pamela K. Kinney

Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both. — Corey Robin

I can state that I created a ballet company of which everyone said: St. Petersburg has the greatest ballet in all Europe. — Marius Petipa

Vladimir Putin was awarded an advanced degree by the St. Petersburg Mining Institute with the help of a dissertation that, as two Brookings researchers discovered, included sixteen stolen pages - and, remarkably, not a single set of quotation marks. — Evan Osnos

A man is an increasingly hard thing to find. We live in a society of boys - twenty-, thirty-, forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year-old boys. Many guys today seem to have the goal of maintaining a junior-high mentality all the way through life. The ultimate in life seems to be to retire, still a boy. I suggest there is virtually no difference between the shuffle board courts of St. Petersburg, Florida, and the parties at Daytona Beach. The proof of my suggestion is that those playing shuffleboard would be at Daytona Beach if they were fifty ears younger. They've not developed into men at all; they've just gotten older. — David A. Dewitt

People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years. — Gyorgy Ligeti

He was a passionate adherent of the new ideas and of Speransky, and the busiest purveyor of news in Petersburg, one of those men who choose their opinions like their clothes - according to the fashion - but for that very reason seem the most vehement partisans — Leo Tolstoy

I need but say that my most vivid impression in that respect was a mere trifle: one day, on Million Street in St. Petersburg, a truck packed with jolly rioters made a clumsy but accurate swerve so as to deliberately squash a passing cat which remained lying there, as a perfectly flat, neatly ironed, black rag (only the tail still belonged to a cat
it stood upright, and the tip, I think, still moved). At the time this struck me with some deep occult meaning, but I have since have occasion to see a bus, in a bucolic Spanish village, flatten by exactly the same method an exactly similar cat, so I have become disenchanted with hidden meanings. — Vladimir Nabokov

The exposure of the conspiracy, the thanks from Petersburg, a career in the future, the influence of 'kindness' on the young people to keep them from falling into the abyss - all this coexisted in complete harmony in her fantastic head. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As a peace machine, it's value to the world will be beyond computation. Would a declaration of war between Russia and Japan be made, if within an hour there after a swifty gliding aeroplane might take its flight from St Petersburg and drop half a ton of dynamite above the enemy's war offices? Could any nation afford to war upon any other with such hazards in view? — John Brisben Walker

It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

So eager were its officials that the German government had telegraphed its ambassador in St. Petersburg two declarations of war to be delivered to Russia's foreign minister: one if Russia did not reply to its ultimatum, the other rejecting the Russian reply as unsatisfactory. In his haste and confusion, the ambassador handed over both messages. — Adam Hochschild

I've never been to St. Petersburg in my life. — Sergey Galitsky

If my arm trembles, it is because it has never been held by a pretty little hand like yours. I am a complete stranger to women; that is, I have never been used to them. You see, I am alone ... I don't even know how to talk to them. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression can not be restrained. In the midst of this, however, He, from Whom all blessings flow, must not be forgotten. A call for a national thanksgiving is being prepared, and will be duly promulgated. — Abraham Lincoln

Peterhof (Petrodvorets). Nicknamed the "Russian Versailles," the elaborate interiors, formal gardens, and beautiful fountains of Peter the Great's summer palace live up to their moniker. This is St. Petersburg's most famous imperial residence, located in the suburbs about 40 minutes away. — Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

He hired a stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, from the only agency in St Petersburg and dictated The Gambler, before completing Crime and Punishment. A few months later, he married her, one of the smartest moves he ever made. She adored him, bore him four children, cured him of gambling and set his business affairs in order. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Listen, listen!" I interrupted her. "Forgive me if I tell you something else ... I tell you what, I can't help coming here to-morrow, I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help going over such moments again in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year. I shall certainly come here to-morrow, just here to this place, just at the same hour, and I shall be happy remembering today. This place is dear to me already. I have already two or three such places in Petersburg. I once shed tears over memories ... like you ... Who knows, perhaps you were weeping ten minutes ago over some memory ... But, forgive me, I have forgotten myself again; perhaps you have once been particularly happy here ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A new-comer of any age or either sex was an impressive curiosity in the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg. — Mark Twain

Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me, the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of 'Middlemarch' and 'A little Princess', and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with 'Anna Karenina'. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read 'Gone with the Wind', 'Rebecca' and 'Jane Eyre'. — Anna Quindlen

I left for Petersburg in August, 1871 and stayed there until 1879. — Carl Spitteler

Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Old St Petersburg remains a beautiful stage set but to the Russians it is not what Rome is to the Italians or Paris to the French. The decisions are made in the Kremlin. The city of Peter remains a museum, open from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. — Joseph Wechsberg

Countess Bezukhova was present among other Russian ladies who had followed the sovereign from Petersburg to Vilna, and eclipsed the refined Polish ladies by her massive, so-called Russian, type of beauty. The Emperor noticed her, and honoured her with a dance. — Leo Tolstoy

When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired. — Tadashi Shoji

None of the places where I grew up and live in my youth exist any longer: Tsarskoe Selo, Sevastopol, Kiev, Slepnyovo, Gungerburg (Ust-Narova).
The following have survived: Khersones (because it is eternal), Paris - by somebody's oversight, and Petersburg-Leningrad, so that there would be a place to lay my head. — Anna Akhmatova

St. Petersburg is a gem of world culture and Russia's most European city. — Valentina Matviyenko

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

In St. Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe. (Cities and be intentional or unintentional. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At the men's end of the table the talk grew more and more animated. The colonel told them that the declaration of war had already appeared in Petersburg and that a copy, which he had himself seen, had that day been forwarded by courier to the commander in chief. — Leo Tolstoy

In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her. — Catherynne M Valente

Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St. Petersburg - that's equivalent to travelling from London to Equatorial Guinea - and deposited him at the Institute of Pedagogy. — Bill Bryson

The convergence of desire is even more obvious at the top: all oligarchs have the same taste in Cristal, from Petersburg to Pyongyang. — Peter Thiel

Stepan Arkadyevitch felt exactly the difference that Pyotr Oblonsky described. In Moscow he degenerated so much that if he had had to be there for long together, he might in good earnest have come to considering his salvation; in Petersburg he felt himself a man of the world again. — Leo Tolstoy

Dostoyevsky dies in St Petersburg (28 January). Buried — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But how do European railways manage without them? How do they continue to convey millions of travellers and mountains of luggage across a continent? If companies owning railways have been able to agree, why should railway workers, who would take possession of railways, not agree likewise? And if the Petersburg-Warsaw Company and that of Paris-Belfort can act in harmony, without giving themselves the luxury of a common commander, why, in the midst of our societies, consisting of groups of free workers, should we need a Government? — Peter Kropotkin

Buildings on the riverbank. He took the last hundred-krone notes and put them in his money belt. He had heard that in St. Petersburg — Jo Nesbo

Putting the dream in motion involved significant personal downsizing, moving three times to trim housing expenses and continuing to freelance. I sold one piece to The New York Times Magazine, many more to The Courant, and another to The St. Petersburg Times. — Gina Greenlee

Petersburg was the kind of town people missed if they sneezed.
Armentrout, Jennifer (2012-09-18). Cursed (p. 86). Midpoint Trade Books. Kindle Edition. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school. — Anthony Marra

For over two centuries (or so historians tell us), it was from the St. Petersburg salons that our country's culture advanced. From those great rooms overlooking the Fontanka Canal, new cuisines, fashions, and ideas all took their first tentative steps into Russian society. — Amor Towles

The peasantry had only recently been freed from slavelike servitude, and they were crushed with debt. The economy was stagnant. The country was hardly industrialized; there were not many factories. Though in St. Petersburg itself, nobles and sophisticates attended balls in Parisian gowns and discussed the poetry of the French, this ramshackle empire also included huge, frigid wastes of fir tree and tundra, deserts where the only inhabitants were nomadic families with their herds, and mountain towns that had never even heard the name of their distant ruler. — M T Anderson

Is it true that in Petersburg you belonged to some secret society of bestial sensualists? Is it true that you could give lessons to the Marquis De Sade? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In a state of mental tumult, conflict and disorientation, he wanders the freezing city night, now gazing at the ice thickening on the dark waters of the Neva, now peering at the great horseman on his plinth with a vague terror, as though the horseman were not the effigy of the city's founder but the herald of four yet more mythic horsemen who are, indeed, on their way to confound Petersburg forever, though they won't arrive yet, not quite yet. — Angela Carter

I am joining the government not from the academic position but from St. Petersburg city council. — Anatoly Chubais

One of the classic settings in fiction, a little world as reassuring as imperial St Petersburg or Victorian London, is suburban Connecticut in the 1950s. If you close your eyes, you can picture autumn leaves drifting down on quiet streets, you can see commuters in fedoras streaming off the platforms of the New Haven Line, you can hear the tinkle of the evening's first pitcher of martinis; and hear the ugly fights then, after midnight; and smell the desperate or despairing sex.
(Introduction to "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit") — Jonathan Franzen

Gripped with bitter cold, ice-locked, Petersburg burned in delirium. One knew: out there, invisible behind the curtain of fog, the red and yellow columns, spires, and hoary gates and fences crept on tiptoe, creaking and shuffling. A fevered, impossible, icy sun hung in the fog - to the left, to the right, above, below - a dove over a house on fire. From the delirium-born, misty world, dragon men dived up into the earthly world, belched fog - heard in the misty world as words, but here becoming nothing - round white puffs of smoke. The dragon men dived up and disappeared again into the fog. And trolleys rushed screeching out of the earthly world into the unknown. ("The Dragon") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

We, the workers and inhabitants of St Petersburg, of various estates, our wives, our children, and our aged, helpless parents, come to THEE, O SIRE to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated ... We are suffocating in despotism and lawlessness. O SIRE we have no strength left, and our endurance is at an end. We have reached that frightful moment when death is better than the prolongation of our unbearable sufferings ... — Orlando Figes

The first time I saw nitroglycerine was in the beginning of the Crimean War. Professor Zinin in St. Petersburg exhibited some to my father and me, and struck some on an anvil to show that only the part touched by the hammer exploded without spreading. — Alfred Nobel

It is often said, rather flatly, that Russian ballet was a mix of French, Scandinavian (through the teacher Johansson), and Italian sources - that Russia, through Petipa, absorbed all of these and made them her own. This is certainly true; but what really changed ballet was the way it became entwined with Imperial Russia herself. Serfdom and autocracy, St. Petersburg and the prestige of foreign culture, hierarchy, order, aristocratic ideals and their ongoing tension with more eastern folk forms: all of these things ran into ballet and made it a quintessentially Russian art. — Jennifer Homans