Limonov Quotes
"At that moment, her sad, determined face became an icon of freedom of expression in the West."
"Of course these virtuous democrats and civil rights activists were respectable people, they said, but the truth is that no one here gives a damn."
"The arrogance and brutality of the authorities when simple citizens dared ask them for an explanation, that was what neither the mothers of the dead soldiers, nor those of the children massacred at the school in Beslan in the Caucasus, nor those of the victims of the Dubrovka Theater, could stand."
"Each year since the hostage-taking, these families have gathered for a commemoration ceremony which the police don’t dare ban outright but nevertheless surveil like a seditious gathering."
"His unconventional behavior and adventurous past impressed us bourgeois youths."
"But here was a woman who since her death has been unanimously considered a saint, describing him and his followers as heroes in Russia’s fight for democracy."
"He wasn’t a novelist—all he could write about was his life—but his life was captivating."
"The newspapers know it too, and feature him incessantly. In short, he’s a star."
"You think back to your time with him, sift through the memories, and try to imagine the chain of circumstances and blend of personal motivations that have led his life so completely away from your own."
"And yet not one said a word against him. No one so much as mentioned the word fascism."
"He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag: I suspend my judgment on the matter."
"People have often told him how lucky he was not to have been with Kostya and the other two the night they got drunk and killed a man."
"Isn’t it better to die while you’re alive than to live the life of a dead person?"
"To survive here you need the skin of an elephant. That's what I've got. You, I'm not so sure."
"To write interesting things you've first got to experience interesting things: adversity, poverty, war."
"To have led a shitty life, but not to have buckled or betrayed."
"To have kept warm in the company of failures like yourself."
"All Russian men worth their salt drink like fish in the sea."
"It's part of my program in life to show an interest in other people."
"You have to fight and be hungry when you’re young, otherwise you’ll never amount to anything."
"If your back’s to the wall you’ll do it like everyone else, don’t worry."
"All in all it’s a warm and reassuring atmosphere for someone who’s just arrived and doesn’t speak English."
"But it’s also something of an old folks’ home, where the dreams of émigrés...slowly ebbed and died."
"Their collective pet peeve, even more than the Bolsheviks, is Nabokov."
"Eduard doesn’t like Nabokov any more than they do, out of class hatred and a disdain for 'literary' literature."
"To become known, a writer has...the choice between inventing stories, telling true ones, and giving his opinion about the world as it is."
"Life in the Soviet Union is gray and boring, but it’s not the concentration camp they make it out to be."
"He wants to talk, she sighs, 'What do you want to talk about?'"
"He feels her fragile vertebrae beneath his strong, nervous hands."
"The cheapest room in a hotel as squalid as the Winslow costs two hundred dollars a month."
"He needs to be protected and pampered, even if he could never totally respect anyone who would protect and pamper him."
"Every morning he walks to Central Park and lies down on the grass."
"He thinks of himself as homosexual but he’s barely active, it’s more a style he’s adopted."
"The Winslow Hotel is a sort of refuge for those Russians."
"Filled with self-pity, he looks at his beautiful, vigorous young body that nobody needs."
"I wasn’t afraid, he thinks, I got screwed in the ass."
"He stays hard for three or four hours; he doesn’t even need the dildo."
"He knows it’s becoming a book and this book is his only chance."
"Nothing is permitted and everything is important."
"They despise their gangs. He, Eduard, can’t be bought, and he can’t be domesticated either."
"She undoes the upper lock, the lower lock, the middle lock, and they’re standing face to face."
"Soviet television, the most masochistic in the world."
"He’s a highwayman who’s happy to deal with the boss one on one, but he doesn’t mix with the riffraff."
"Everything is allowed and nothing is important; here it’s just the opposite."
"In life, Eduard thought, you’ve got to have a gang."
"The market decided, the market is right."
"The choice is simple, Mikhail Sergeyevich. Either you side with the democrats, who you know are right, or you side with the conservatives, who you know are not only wrong but also certain to betray you."
"It’s impossible for the leader of a nation not to be. Even the most innocent among them will have signed a shameful decree, failed to pardon someone."
"Hunted and cornered in an anonymous room, underslept, helping each other face death, they’ve given us, unrehearsed, a scene worthy of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles."
"The Party? Now wait a second… He fell back into the typical hedging of a politician who tries to make everyone happy."
"And so during these historic days on the world stage there was a second White House, far from the one in Washington."
"War is dirty, sure, war is senseless, but come on! Civilian life is also senseless, in its sameness and its reasonableness and because it dulls the instincts."
"The taste for war, real war, is as natural to man as the taste for peace, it’s idiotic to want to eliminate it by repeating virtuously that peace is good and war is evil."
"When one side is weaker and the other stronger, even if you make it a point of honor to note that those on the weaker side aren’t all angels and those on the stronger side aren’t all devils, you side with the weaker."
"The Soviet Union? Now wait a second… He fell back into the typical hedging of a politician who tries to make everyone happy, taking himself for the pope one day and Luther the next, and so wound up equally hated by the democrats and the conservatives."
"A well-off retiree who’ll be granted a dacha, a foundation, and the right to give exceedingly well-paid lectures until the end of his days."
"The key thing is to prepare for the impending siege."
"The bravest men in Russia are here, ready to fight. It’s up to you to decide, Comrade President. Do you want to go down in history as a great man or as a coward?"
"And finally, they’re delighted with the flag that a painter friend of theirs, a guy as meek as a lamb and specializing in Umbrian and Tuscan landscapes, draws on a kitchen table."
"He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know."
"The truth is that we do the work that your people should be doing."
"I’m not in politics, but I like your men as well."
"He’s no genius, but he’ll eat out of our hands."
"Everything is tender, friendly. They feel good, the seven of them, under the kerosene lamp."
"It would have been so easy to plant some there. You’ve got to give the FSB credit for having such prim legal scruples."
"For a man who sees himself as the hero of a novel, prison is one chapter that can’t be missed."
"A good zek is an exhausted, demoralized zek: that’s also on purpose."
"I approach other people, other people approach me. Things fall naturally into place."
"You have no right to say to 150 million people that seventy years of their lives were nothing but shit."
"He pulls himself heavily from his chair. Just before leaving the frame he looks at himself in the mirror, bounces from foot to foot, mimes a couple of boxing moves, and you can hear him murmur, not very loud, just to himself: 'I’m the boss. I’m the boss. I’m the boss.'"
"Cities parched by the sun; dusty, slow, violent. In the shadow of the mosques, over there, under the high crenellated walls, there are beggars."