A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian Quotes
"Ah, love! What thing is love! No one can understand. On this point, science must concede to poetry."
"Maybe it'll be OK. Maybe she'll look after him, and make him happy in his last years. It's better than going into a home."
"Love has got nothing to do with it. I'll do my duty, as I sincerely hope you will. Even if that means saving him from making an absolute idiot of himself."
"I did what I could for Mother. Towards Father I feel a sense of obligation: nothing more."
"But let's face it, neither you nor I are going to look after him in his old age, are we?"
"You see, in love as in aviation, all is a matter of the balance."
"Nadia, if all women were to wear paint on their faces, just think, there could be no more natural selection."
"You see in prehistoric times, great stones were moved on wooden rollers made out of tree-trunks."
"The coming of the tractor was also of symbolic importance, for it made possible the ploughing up of boundary lands which separated the individual peasant strips, creating one large kolkhoz."
"The early makers of the tractor dreamed that swords would be turned into ploughshares, but now the spirit of the century grows dark, and we find that, instead, ploughshares are to be turned into swords."
"Why you still living? You should be long ago lying beside Ludmilla, dead beside dead."
"Soon you will return where you belong! Under ground. Under dooh-ress! Hah!"
"No, on contrary, language is supremely important. In language are encapsulated not only thoughts but cultural values..."
"Of course that was different. In relation to a man, a woman is always the victim."
"Sometimes I wonder, Nadia, whether there is not such a thing as a victim mentality."
"It's about society – different forces and groups in society and why they behave as they do."
"He thinks he’s so clever he can outwit the system."
"But when a man allows himself to be beaten by a woman, you must admit, there’s something wrong."
"If that isn’t contemptible, tell me what is."
"The past is filthy. It’s like a sewer. You shouldn’t play there."
"But of course I did not fall for this trick."
"Giving ourselves plenty of time, we take our places at the back of the courtroom, which is in a sombre oak-panelled chamber where oblique sunlight filters through windows too high to see out of."
"You think you very clever, Mr Engineer, but you wait. Remember I always get what I want."
"‘This is doing of this evil witch sister!’ she cries combing the air with her scarlet nails."
"‘It matters not who fathered the child, but who will be the father to it,’ says Dubov quietly."
"‘No, no,’ says Vera. ‘It didn’t happen like that. They were plums, not cherries. And it was the NKVD that caught him, not the Germans. The Germans came afterwards.’"
"So who do you think is the father? Eric Pike or Bald Ed?"
"But Pappa, who is it? You should call the police."
"But is it worth losing a new-found sister over?"
"We were poor, but we were never scroungers. The English people believe in fairness. Fair play. Like cricket."
"But she pities us, too, Nadia. She thinks we’re stupid and ugly – and flat-chested."
"But … we need to know. Pappa needs to know."
"She is very afraid of you, Nadia and Vera."
"‘Afraid of us?’ I laugh. ‘Are we so frightening?’"
"She is afraid of being sent back to Ukraina."
"At this time, yes she is. At this time, our beloved mother-country is in the grip of criminals and gangsters."
"Those advisers who came from the West to show us how to build a capitalist economy, their model was the rapacious type of early American capitalism."
"‘And there are those who argue that this gangster stage is necessary in the development of capitalism,’ adds Dubov."
"But those gangster types who are already there, whose predatory instincts are held in check by the fabric of civil society, once that fabric is torn asunder, why, they flourish like weeds in a newly ploughed field."
"In the short term not. In the long term I would say yes. Personally, I would favour the Scandinavian model. Take the best from both capitalism and socialism."
"Once we were a nation of farmers and engineers. We were not rich, but we had enough."
"Our national export is the sale of our beautiful young women into prostitution to feed the monstrous appetites of the Western male. It is a tragedy."
"They laugh at us. They suppose such corruption is in our nature."
"But I would argue that it is merely characteristic of the type of economy which has been thrust upon us."
"The only one who is against you is your own folly. Be grateful that there are those around you to save you from yourself."