Siberian Quotes & Sayings

There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is no created for such measureless. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship's deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The worst case scenario sees the Amazon rainforest burning, huge amounts of methane being released by Siberian peat bogs and so on - by the time today's six year olds are 60, such a scenario would see global warming already out of control. — Mark Lynas

Was a clear, pale blue like the eyes of a Siberian husky dog. Human beings just didn't have eyes like that. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz The poor child cries as alone he goes There's no bread and there's no fat The party's ended all of that Seek not the gentle nor the mild A father's eaten his own child The party man he beats and stamps And sends us to Siberian camps38 — Timothy Snyder

What was that all about? She looked like a pissed-off Siberian tiger."
"Believe me, Prit, a Siberian tiger is a pussycat compared to Lucia. — Manel Loureiro

Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana? Try to imagine this: You're a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it's directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep. And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone, possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That's hysteria siberiana. — Haruki Murakami

What I liked was the train ride. It took an hour and that was enough for me to be able to lean backwards against the seat with closed eyes, feel the joints in the rails come up and thump through my body and sometimes peer out of the windows and see windswept heathland and imagine I was on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I had read about it, seen pictures in a book and decided that no matter when and how life would turn out, one day I would travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on that train, and I practised saying the names: Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, they were difficult to pronounce with all their hard consonants, but ever since the trip to Skagen, every journey I made by train was a potential departure on my own great journey. — Per Petterson

Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant - for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost
unbearable - who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery,
perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone.
And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished
beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection
which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity. — Albert Camus

As the Siberian saying goes: One hundred versts (roughly a hundred miles) is no distance. A hundred rubles isn't worthwhile money. And a hundred grams of vodka just makes you thirsty. — Farley Mowat

Scientists estimate that the Siberian permafrost holds the remains of 150 million mammoths - or about 8 million more than the 142 million Russians aboveground in Russia today. — Ian Frazier

Aware of her uneasy gaze straying to his rampant arousal, Sebastian shot her a scornful glance.
"Pay it no mind," he said, climbing into bed with her. "From now on, I have every expectation that proximity to you will affect my private parts like a prolonged swim in a Siberian lake. — Lisa Kleypas

She had not been conferred with a practical sense of how one went about this strange and all inverted business of being a girl, where seemingly natural stuff like going on about all the great things you just learned about Siberian tigers on National Geographic was suddenly weird, but totally weird stuff in and of itself like drawing around your eyeball with a pencil became normal, and it impressed to no end that it was a product of meticulous effort that made the twins seem so perfectly and effortlessly feminine. — Brian McGreevy

How many times did the sun shine, how many times did the wind howl over the desolate tundras, over the bleak immensity of the Siberian taigas, over the brown deserts where the Earth's salt shines, over the high peaks capped with silver, over the shivering jungles, over the undulating forests of the tropics! Day after day, through infinite time, the scenery has changed in imperceptible features. Let us smile at the illusion of eternity that appears in these things, and while so many temporary aspects fade away, let us listen to the ancient hymn, the spectacular song of the seas, that has saluted so many chains rising to the light. — Emile Argand

Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's. — John McWhorter

Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together. — Terence McKenna

She felt like one of the luckless peasant girls in some Russian hagiography, left to fend for her family in deep Siberian snows.
Ever a logical girl, she didn't like where the hints all around were leading her. — Liz Braswell

It made you happy, to be used by me?" Perhaps not so promising. I raised my brows with amusement. "I orgasmed three times; you did once. Who's using whom, Siberian? — Kresley Cole

The entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region is melting, and it has all happened in the last three or four years. — Joseph J. Romm

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did
which was to hide. — James Baldwin

November 18, 2014: it's a day that should live forever in history. On that day, in the city of Yiwu in China's Zhejiang province, 300 kilometers south of Shanghai, the first train carrying 82 containers of export goods weighing more than 1,000 tons left a massive warehouse complex heading for Madrid. It arrived on December 9th. Welcome to the new trans-Eurasia choo-choo train. At over 13,000 kilometers, it will regularly traverse the longest freight train route in the world, 40% farther than the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway. Its cargo will cross China from East to West, then Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, France, and finally Spain. — Anonymous

In this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected. — John Dos Passos

I was studying my 'Bold and Beautiful' script the other day, lying in a hammock, when one of my Siberian tigers walked up and grabbed it out of my hand - she wanted to play. See - teeth marks! — Tippi Hedren

My father will go see Trans-Siberian Orchestra every single year. I mean, he's completely into it. — Eddie Trunk

Why did you want me to dress warmly?" she asks. "Are you taking me to a Siberian prison?"
"Nope."
"Abandoned research station in Antarctica?"
"Nope."
"You're taking me to practice for our two-person skeleton race at the Olympics."
"Yes. — Stephanie Perkins

As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj
Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate
conclusion - usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of
some substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last
book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible
to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home.
After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must
go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine,
without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes
and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular
view in front of you. — Marisha Pessl

Further north, I met a Siberian hermit who lived in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. His life's passion was wrestling black bears ... in the nude (him not the bears). He did not know why he did it. All the hermit knew was that if he stopped wrestling bears, he would die. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

Who is the lonely Traveller
Racing the moonlight to my door?
Racing his troika over the steppe
Pacing his steeds with the wind in the forest.
The North wind that harries
The South wind that tarries
Who the lone Traveller come to my door?
- Lonely no more."

Siberian song - Trans-Baikal region — Lesley Blanch

WILL YOU TELL MEGAN WELLS SHE IS OUT OF HER COTTONPICKING MIND? if she's that bored with civilization why doesn't she just move to a siberian salt mine? — Helene Hanff

For a professional writer in the Soviet Union, it works this way. First, you have to have something to say - that's the main thing. Second, it's a matter of who publishes you. If your book has real stuff in it, readers will ferret it out, even in a Siberian journal. — Anatoly Rybakov

In the fall of 1932, Bergelson undertook the longest journey of his life. He traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way through Siberia and beyond, disembarking just fifty miles shy of the border with China, in the budding Jewish autonomy of Birobidzhan. The Jews of Birobidzhan welcomed him grandly, as if he were a long-lost descendant of a royal Yiddish tribe. A plenary session of the settlement council convened in his honor. He toured the new collective farms in the company of local authorities. He participated, as a guest of honor, in the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution - an unprecedented role for a foreign national. — Masha Gessen

I'd read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre. — Ian Frazier

I fall asleep
Call it deep while all is well be-
Cause my life seems like a freestyle mean-
While asleep on the couch I dream it's a written piece and now
The symphony's sounding
Shouting out to these feet whose leaps feel foul but quite loud
But how
I'm allowed to live my dreams
My Chimeran team brings the Siberian breed
Riding reality free 'til these tires they freeze
In mires in dire need of wires, fire and heat but
I love a dark, hard cold heart in the wintery breeze — Criss Jami

It's best to love your family as you would a Siberian tiger-from a distance, preferably separated by bars. — Stephan Pastis

I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular. — Blaise Cendrars

You can find dozens of books about people taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I knew I had to do something different to cross Siberia. To drive and to talk with people along the way, that was how I wrote my book 'Great Plains'. I drove and camped in Siberia, but did not have a real program. — Ian Frazier

You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralyzing venom, while the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing. — Bill Bailey

The White Hand did not fry all the brain. He fried some
from the right hemisphere and some from the left. The
remaining brain, The White Hand wrapped in tin foil,
carefully. Tomorrow is, after all, another day, and food should be kept
in storage so it won't go bad. — Siberian Hellhole By Michael Mulvihill

My last point about getting started as a writer: do something first, good or bad, successful or not, and write it up before approaching an editor. The best introduction to an editor is your own written work, published or not. I traveled across Siberia on my own money before ever approaching an editor; I wrote my first book, Siberian Dawn, without knowing a single editor, with no idea of how to get it published. I had to risk my life on the Congo before selling my first magazine story. If the rebel spirit dwells within you, you won't wait for an invitation, you'll invade and take no hostages. — Jeffery Taylor

The Trans-Siberian Express is like a cruise across an oceanic landscape. I've done it three times. — Paul Theroux

When that small Siberian bird fell out of the sky over Gray's River, not once but twice, he brought with him the sweetness of chance in any place, the certainty of wonder in all places. And if that's not grace, I don't know what it. — Robert Michael Pyle

Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it "normal," and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called "human nature" was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes's dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana. — Christopher Ryan

Finally I got to carbon, and as you all know, in the case of carbon the reaction works out beautifully. One goes through six reactions, and at the end one comes back to carbon. In the process one has made four hydrogen atoms into one of helium. The theory, of course, was not made on the railway train from Washington to Ithaca ... It didn't take very long, it took about six weeks, but not even the Trans-Siberian railroad [has] taken that long for its journey. — Hans Bethe

And what good's a life that leaves nothing behind/Not a thought or a dream that might echo in time. — Trans-Siberian Orchestra

As a young man, the seer became a rake. He drank and fought and made free with the village girls. He became a wagoner, carrying goods and passengers to other villages, an occupation that extended the range of his conquests. A good talker, sure of himself, he tried every girl he met. His method was direct: he grabbed and started undoing buttons. Naturally, he was frequently kicked and scratched and bitten, but the sheer volume of his efforts brought him notable success. He learned that even in the shyest and primmest of girls, the emptiness and loneliness of life in a Siberian village had bred a flickering appetite for romance and adventure. Gregory's talent was for stimulating those appetites and overcoming all hesitations by direct, good-natured aggression. — Robert K. Massie

The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian airports- to break the icy seal. Stepping outside was like stepping onto another planet, for at those low temperatures nothing seems quite normal. The air burns. Sounds are brittle. Every breath hovers in a strangle slow-motion cloud, adding to the mist of ice that pervades the city and blurs the sun. When the breath freezes into ice dust and falls almost silently to the ground, Siberians call it the whisper of stars. — David K. Shipler

Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can't help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be. — T.H. White

As this drama played out in Moscow, over two thousand miles to the east in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk; six men gathered on the stairs of one of the old communist era apartment blocks. — Pete Buckley

Clearly, Siberian reindeer are not fighting over drugged urine for its nutrative value. — David J. Linden