We Man and the Natural World Quotes

But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancients had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapor). I love—and I'm certain that I'm not mistaken if I say we love—skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality— which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects. (2.2)

You see? Spring! She talks about Spring! Females! (2.6)

It occurred to me—it's true, I wasn't before … but now I … It seems I no longer live in our rational world, but in an ancient, delirious—a world of square roots of minus one. (14.9)

From beyond the Wall, from the infinite ocean of green, there arose toward me an immense wave of roots, branches, flowers, leaves. It rose higher and higher. (16.3)

Beyond the Wall, the sharp black triangles of some birds; they would rush, cawing, in onslaught on the invisible fence of electric waves, and as they felt the electricity against their breasts, they would recoil and soar once more beyond the Wall. (21.3)

Through the glass—foggy and dim—I saw the stupid muzzle of some kind of beast, his yellow eyes, obstinately repeating one and the same incomprehensible thought at me. We looked at each other for a long time, eye to eye, through the mineshafts from the surface world to that other world, beyond the surface. But a thought swarmed in me: what if he, this yellow-eyed being—in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life—is happier than us? (17.5)

They say that there is a kind of flower that blooms only once a century. Then couldn't there be one that flowers only once every thousand years—or once every ten thousand years? Maybe there are and we just don't know it because today is itself that once-in-a-thousand-year moment. (23.1)

But what you didn't know, and few do, is that a small group of them survived and stayed to live there, behind the walls. Naked, they went off into the woods. They learned from the trees, the beasts, the birds, the flowers, the sun. They grew hair all over, but under their fur, they harbored hot, red blood. It's worse for you: you are overgrown with numbers, numbers crawl all over you, like lice. You all need to be stripped of everything and be driven out naked into the forest. Let it teach you to shiver from fear, from joy, from mad rage, from the cold and to pray to the fire. And we, MEPHI, we want … (28.38)

But we—we know, meanwhile, that there is no final number. Though we might forget it too. Yes—it's highly probable that we will forget it when we grow older—and everyone inevitably grows older. And then, unavoidably, down we will go like autumn leaves from a tree … just like all of you, the day after tomorrow when … No, no, my sweet—not you yourself. You are on our side, of course, you are on our side! (30.27)

Do you believe that you will die? Yes, people are mortal and if I am a person, then, of course … But that's not what I mean. I know that you know this. I am asking: has it ever happened that you have believed in your death, believed in it totally, believed in it, not with your mind, but with your body, feeling that one day the fingers that are holding this very page will be yellow, icy … ? (32.1)