Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz, a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.

I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years. We literally lived underground. We dug a hole and lived there for years. My father cleaned public toilets, even though he was a highly respected poet. Nationality and borders are barriers to our intelligence, to our imagination and to all kinds of possibilities.

She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.

Most men in a brazen prison live, Where, in the sun's hot eye, With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall.

They wanna censor me, they ratha see me in a cell, livin' in hell, with only a few of us to live to tell.

Freud was the son of a Jewish merchant who had to move his whole family to Vienna because he couldn't get work. He, as a boy, had to watch his father be mocked and abused on the street for being Jewish... You develop a thick skin and you develop a certain kind of wit to defend yourself.

I've never stabbed, hurt, killed, stolen, anything, but I went to jail for a year. What is that? My pastor said to me the fact that I'm not living under a bridge as a crazy woman, talking to myself, is amazing.

I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.

On some days in prison you might just need to get out of there, but on some days - not all days, but some - you might be able to see the sky and see the blue in it.

I think to be in exile is a curse, and you need to turn it into a blessing. You've been thrown into exile to die, really, to silence you so that your voice cannot come home. And so my whole life has been dedicated to saying, 'I will not be silenced.'

We have real cliched ideas of what prison life is like. It is not a happy place. It's a desperate, sad situation.

I have recurring nightmares about being in a Nazi concentration camp with all my family and constantly being sent to solitary confinement.

My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.

As awful as the crimes of Stalinism were, the vast majority of the Russian population was trying to survive, to love, to have a sense of purpose.

I have a good sense of humour, and that's what kept me for the 30 years I was locked up.

I did yoga in the cell, meditated, and slept well; somebody brings you some food and drink. I've been arrested four times now.

For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.

For some not to be martyrs is martyrdom indeed.

They will kill me but they will not kill my voice, because it will be the voice of all Afghan women. You can cut the flower, but you cannot stop the coming of spring.

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.

But sometimes, in tight corners, when your back is against the wall and the world is against you, you have to fight back in unexpected ways.

I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.

When your back is against the wall, there is only one thing to do, and that is turn around and fight.