Yevgeny Yevtushenko
22 quotes
Biography
"When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie."
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."
"The hell with it. Who never knew the price of happiness will not be happy."
"So on and on we walked without thinking of rest passing craters, passing fire, under the rocking sky of '41 tottering crazy on its smoking columns."
"Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!"
"Over Babiy Yar there are no memorials. The steep hillside like a rough inscription. I am frightened. Today I am as old as the Jewish race."
"No Jewish blood runs among my blood, but I am as bitterly and hardly hated by every anti-semite as if I were a Jew. By this I am a Russian."
"No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet."
"I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life"
"[I] do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck—and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay—and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road."
"Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?"
"Time has a way of demonstrating The most stubborn are the most intelligent."
"My dear friend Yevtushenko has, I claim, an ego that can crack crystal at a distance of twenty feet."
"He has a clear style and has had much courage – as in his poem "Babi Yar", a memorial to the Jews murdered by the Nazis. But he is no more than a talented poetaster – which is quite obvious to all but Western journalists – and it would be foolish to consider him as more than a skilful publicist."
"I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people…People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence."
"Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy."
"Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent."
"They tell me, shaking their heads:"You should be kinder. You are somehow furious".I used to be kind. It didn’t last long."
"no one sleeps more beautifully than you. But i am afraid that you will waken just now, and touch me with an indifferent glance, lightly passing, and commit the murder of beauty."
"Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing."
"Time has a way of demonstrating . . . the most stubborn are the most intelligent."
"A show of envy is an insult to oneself."