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It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive als… - Yevgeny Zamyatin
" "It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment. The same is true of what we write: it walks and it talks, but it can be dead-alive or alive-alive. What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, "childish" questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.
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About Yevgeny Zamyatin
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin [Евге́ний Ива́нович Замя́тин — also romanized as Eugene Zamiatin, as well as Evgeny, Evgenij; Ivenovitch, Evenovitch, and Zamjatin] (February 1, 1884 – March 10, 1937) was a Russian author famous for his dystopian novel, We, which influenced and inspired later dystopian works such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Also Known As
Native Name:
Евге́ний Ива́нович Замя́тин
Alternative Names:
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin
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Eugene Zamyatin
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Zamâtin Evgenij Ivanovič
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Additional quotes by 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.
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 see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck. He can be dragged down from the mast and put to tending the boilers or working the capstan, but that will not change anything: the mast will remain, and the next man on the masthead will see what the first has seen. In a storm, you must have a man aloft. We are in the midst of storm today, and SOS signals come from every side.
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