Metro 2034 Quotes
"With every hour that passed the tension grew more palpable."
"Everyone at Sebastopol could handle a weapon, from a five-year-old boy to the very oldest man."
"Ground waters were the blessing and the curse of Sebastopol Station."
"The finest combat troops hadn’t grabbed a single moment of shuteye all night long."
"The inhabitants of the station, the crew of this ghostly frigate hurtling through the nether regions of the Underworld, were doomed eternally to seek out and patch over new breaches in the hull of their vessel."
"But no matter how skilful the engineers of Sebastopol Station were, no matter how experienced and pitiless the soldiers trained there might be, they could not effectively defend their home without ammunition, without bulbs for the floodlights, without antibiotics and bandages."
"The whole world seemed to have ganged up against the Sebastopolites in a bitter determination to wipe their home off the map of the Metro."
"The gathering darkness was not in the station, but in people’s hearts, and not even the very brightest mercury lamps could dispel it."
"Potatoes, cucumbers, and tomatoes were regarded as very great delicacies here: apart from Sebastopol Station, the only places where you could feast on vegetables were one or two of the finest restaurants of the Circle or the Polis."
"It was probably the way polar explorers used to feel, abandoned in the Arctic after voluntarily condemning themselves to long months of battling the cold and loneliness."
"When you live by side with death for many years, the fear of dying gives way to indifference, fatalism, superstitions, protective amulets, and animal instincts."
"Better to let the goods go cheap than set off right round the Metro in pursuit of profit, on a journey that could be cut short at any moment."
"Once you've reduced a woman to tears, you can only demean yourself by turning round and trying to console her."
"The male indifference to death seemed stupid, egotistic, and criminal to her."
"It's just a story. But how can we get by here without stories?"
"The darkness sliced open by the beam of the flashlight closed up again right behind their backs, the echoes of their footsteps fractured as they were reflected off the reinforcing ribs of countless sections of tunnel lining."
"The structure is incredibly elegant – simple, divinely light and uncluttered."
"In defiance of the laws of nature, the heaps of dead meat moved as if they were breathing."
"Senile anxiety, Homer told himself contemptuously."
"Everything living dies sooner or later, it will all become their food anyway. All they have to do is wait."
"Despite the approaching hour of reckoning for his godlessness, Homer still couldn’t bring himself to believe in either the Lord or the Devil."
"In the tunnels, a man is as helpless and naïve as those children."
"When her father said ‘the colour of the sky’, of course he meant the azure sky that lived on in his memory, not the crimson sky that eddied and swirled above him when he went up there at night."
"The stations that followed Nakhimov Prospect – Nagornaya, Nagatino and Tula – had no exits of their own."
"The pursuit had been called off, they could get their breath back."
"Fossilisation – that’s the fate of man and his creations."
"A real failure this time, I’m so sorry," he said. "I decided to go to the garages after all."
"The early morning was her time. She could sense the approach of day and always rose before the sun did."
"The crowd surged and seethed, growing larger and larger."
"The black puddle he was lying in spread wider and wider by the minute, as if it was drawing energy from his departing life."
"But Ahmed knew he was doomed. Why did they take him, and not me?"
"There was a lot of life in him. They feed on human lives."
"It's not fair. He's got little children, he still has so much to live for!"
"The station had drugged them with its narcotic exhalations, like some predatory orchid."
"Existence had lost its meaning, the ball of thread that could have shown him the right path to follow through the endless labyrinth of tunnels, had fallen from his grasp."
"The memory of man is like sand in the desert."
"The gripping story of a great hero and his love could outlive the story of an entire civilization."
"There is nothing more valuable than human life."
"He had never needed to make any special effort in love before: women themselves cast down their banners at his feet."
"Matter is almost indestructible. But what he wanted to preserve for posterity, the elusive, ephemeral substance that dwelt on the newspaper pages, would vanish forever, completely."
"And then, instead of imperishable, eternal darkness, he saw before him an impossibly blue sky – as clear and bright as his daughter's eyes."
"Every additional minute spent here on the edge of the cliff, where the tunnel emerged from the thickness of the earth like a vein from a slashed wrist, cost her a year of her life."
"She would have liked to think their bodies were like candles, and a little particle of her father had been transferred to her after his light was extinguished."
"In the tight grip of the fetters her ankles had swollen up and gone numb. Sasha realized that even if she could defeat the metal, she still wouldn't be able to run away, because her legs would refuse to obey her."
"All the scientists and science-fiction writers never got their forecasts of the future right."
"It was strange: here, beyond the yellow marker, his body groaned under the fifty per cent increase in the force of gravity, but his soul was soaring, weightless."
"He realized that if he carried on doubting and started pandering to his yearning for a home and a woman, if he constantly looked back, he was certain to miss something very important up ahead."
"He couldn't treat his life's work as a part-time job. It was pointless to play coy with destiny, promising to devote himself to his work wholeheartedly a bit later on, the next time around... There might not be any next time."
"And though she hadn't spoken a word yet, he was ready in advance to believe her. For after all, apart from everything else, this teenage girl, with her white, tousled, carelessly lopped hair, pointed little ears, soot-smeared cheeks and exposed, sculpted collarbones – surprisingly white and vulnerable – with her childishly plump, bitten lower lip, was beautiful in a very special way."
"Sasha would have liked to think these two men had not picked her up simply by chance, that they had been sent to the station especially for her, but she knew it wasn't true."
"A man like that could make almost anyone submit to his will, and he would eliminate anyone who disobeyed without compunction."
"The trolley moved forward at an incredible pace."
"Year by year his Moscow was growing older, falling apart, being eroded away."
"The visibility was atrocious, the silvery moonlight couldn’t force its way through the filter of dense clouds."
"Completely absorbed in his musings, at that moment Homer wasn’t thinking of anything else."
"It was very obvious that she felt uncomfortable up on the surface."
"He behaved just like a child on a holiday outing, gazing in delight at the blurred silhouettes of the high-rises."
"Fear spurs a man on to take action and be creative."
"Terror paralyses the body and blocks the flow of thought, it makes a man less human."
"When one day’s like any other, they fly by so fast and it seems like the last one is really close already."
"You think: never mind – I’ll start tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes, it’s always just one long, endless today."
"It’s not what we breathe in, it’s what’s breathed into us."
"A single dagger thrust from those eyes of hers had made Hunter reverse a decision, a single movement from her had snared him in a net and kept him from killing."
"Although he had swapped the stifling black gas mask for a light respirator, he still found it just as hard to breathe and the vice that was crushing his head hadn’t slackened its grip."
"If it was up to Homer, he would have erected a genuine monument to them. But they surely deserved at least a basic headstone."
"The scouts who went up onto the surface first couldn’t get to sleep for days after they returned from their mission."
"Billions of lives were broken off simultaneously. Billions of thoughts were left unspoken, billions of dreams were left unrealised, billions of grievances were left unforgiven."
"No matter what nonsense the girl might talk, a glance into the empty eye sockets of eternity is certainly a great stimulus to action."
"Night at Pavelets Station is always restless. Glimmers of light from the smoking torches flicker across the soot-stained marble walls, the tunnels breathe uneasily."
"The only people who came to visit the dead were their children or parents; grandchildren came far more rarely, great-grandchildren almost never."
"In effect, photographs of the departed can be regarded as death masks, cast from the body, but certainly not life masks cast from the soul."
"And it also seemed to him that if he wanted to rely on her being sincere and open – and how else could she become his heroine? – then he would have to be honest with her himself, not leave things unsaid and tell her everything he would have told himself."
"They fell like grains of sand out of one incredibly vast glass flask into another, bottomless one."
"Listening to the time pass, Artyom sat in the narrow throat between these two invisible vessels."
"The only sound that disturbs the dead now is the ringing of the phone."
"The crimson glow of the emergency batteries blinks in its death throes."
"Legends circulated about him in the garrison: supposedly the former mercenary had been famous for his skill in handling cold weapons and his ability to dissolve into the darkness."
"What if the lines are damaged? Then it would be like with base... But with them at least I get the signal."
"If there's no one left there, then we'll all croak soon. And that makes our quarantine pointless."
"There was nothing Sasha could do to help him, but she had to see him anyway. If only to say thank you."
"It was easier for him to kill than to ask for anything."
"Sometimes it can be useful to see yourself from the outside."
"You mean beauty doesn't exist without people?"
"There are people who've never seen their own reflection and all their lives they think they're someone different."
"The old man didn't even notice. It was time to give Sasha the little trifle he had bought for her at the market."
"With a great effort, her fingers slipping over the scorching valve wheel, she released the hot water... It was boiling!"
"You can't understand that. You have to see it for yourself..."
"The only way he could help was by making himself scarce as quickly as possible, in order not to frighten Sasha off."
"Watching all this, he understood that he could never express this magnificent picture in words."
"Now she could look. Slowly parting her eyelids and peeping suspiciously out of the corners of her eyes at first, then gazing more boldly, Sasha looked round at the strange place she had ended up in."
"Above her head was the sky. The real sky, bright and immense. Giving more light than any searchlight, illuminated in an even green colour all the way across, masked by low clouds in places and in others opening up into a bottomless abyss."
"The sun! She saw it through an attenuated veil of cloud: a round disc the size of a detonator cap, polished to a spotless white and so bright that Sasha felt as if it would burn a hole in her glasses in another moment."
"And yet it was enchanting, it attracted and excited her."
"It wasn’t important that they were tinted a silly-looking green, like the ground under her feet, like the air itself and the insanely glowing, bottomless sky – she could see such unimaginably vast distances now."
"Before, when she crept out of the tunnel onto the cliff, she felt as if she had been dragged out of her protective shell, but now it seemed more like an eggshell that she had finally hatched out of."
"It didn’t just wash away dust and weariness – the sky water cleaned people on the inside, granting them forgiveness for the mistakes they had made."
"But in this story there were still many things that she could change, even if she didn’t yet know how."
"The important thing was that her strength had come back to her."
"Scrape away the patina and mould of time, and the past started to shine – like the coloured mosaics and bronze panels at abandoned stations."
"She really had no choice anyway: to get back down into the Metro, she would have to go back into the building swarming with those fearsome creatures – only they weren’t sleeping anymore."