A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday's clock, nor by today's but by tomorrow's. It is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can … - Yevgeny Zamyatin

The formal character of a living literature is the same as its inner character: it denies verities; it denies what everyone knows and what I have known until this moment. It departs from the canonical tracks, from the broad highway. … To literature today the plane surface of daily life is what the earth is to an airplane — a mere runway from which to take off, in order to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the fantastic. Let yesterday's cart creak along the well-paved highways. The living have strength enough to cut away their yesterday.

The two inhabitants of Paradise were given the opportunity to choose: happiness without freedom or freedom without happiness; tertium non datur. And they, donkeys, chose freedom: so what? You understand: then they regretted the chains for centuries.

Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.