Pushkin Russia Quotes & Sayings

There is a famous painting, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. I am in love with that painting. Sometimes, I think everyone is like the people in that painting, everyone lost in their own private universes of pain or sorrow or guilt, everyone remote and unknowable. The painting reminds me of you. It breaks my heart. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep. — Lev Shestov

Just as you are unconsciously influenced by outside advertisement, announcement, and appeal, so you can vitally influence your life from within by auto-suggestion. The first thing each morning, and the last thing each night, suggest to yourself specific ideas that you wish to embody in your character and personality. Address such suggestions to yourself, silently or aloud, until they are deeply impressed upon your mind. — Grenville Kleiser

We live without power of law, like flocks of ravens
they come and sweep over the land. — Alexander Pushkin

Children need to be exploring their physical world. They need to be learning the fundamental laws of physics by manipulating objects. — David Perlmutter

Communication is the solvent of all problems and is the foundation for personal development. — Peter Shepherd

Well, I haven't signed anything giving people the right to do anything they want with my image, you know what I mean. I have the ultimate say. — Joaquin Phoenix

Cats are like Baptists. You know they raise hell, but you can never catch them at it. — James Patterson

We are the the night ocean filled with glints of light. We are the space between the fish and the moon, while we sit here together. — Rumi

Your health is not something you biologically lose as you age. It is something you build or give away a little each day, in what you do, and what you don't do. — Jayson Calton

That's it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas. — Alan Rickman

You know very well." Daisy ignored the way her breath hitched when he got too near. "You get riled up and off you go, throwing that Highland accent about as if to intimidate." She dropped her voice in an imitation of his. "Ye will do as I say or I will take ye overr me knee an' stroop yer backside! — Kristen Callihan

I have been an elated reader of all the great Russian novelists and short-story writers since my early twenties and I have often written about them, though I know no Russian and have never been to Russia. The lure for me (I realize now) lay in John Bayley's wonderful phrase - I believe in his learned introduction to Pushkin's Letters - that the "doors of the Russian house are wide open": we see people who speak out in the lost hours of the day as it passes through them. — V.S. Pritchett

Life's tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars' worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can't do that. So fiction does. — Stanley Elkin