St. Petersburg Quotes

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

The first time I saw nitroglycerine was in the beginning of the Crimean War. Professor Zinin in St. Petersburg exhibited some to my father and me, and struck some on an anvil to show that only the part touched by the hammer exploded without spreading.

My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.

When I was young, I always wanted to go to Russia.

I feel really lucky to have had 'War and Peace' as my first big telly job. I was playing this incredible character, and we were shooting in Catherine the Great's palace near St. Petersburg in the winter, when the river was frozen. It was a dream. I still can't believe it. I wanted to soak up every last minute.

When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired.

Jane Kindred’s THE HOUSE OF ARKHANGEL'SK dazzles with its surreal blending of worlds. Lost angel Anazakia, last survivor of her murdered family, finds herself in the hands of demons with suspect motives, betrayed by her own kind, stranded in the world of Man—21st century St. Petersburg, Russia, to be exact. Weaving startling visuals with compelling characters, Kindred reveals parallels in the two worlds that are ‘neither haphazard chance nor calculated design.’ It’s a dizzying, vibrant read.

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.

Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won.

My family didn't have time for me, so I decided to join the Suvorov military academy, which is in St. Petersburg. I spent two years there and studied general military science. At that point, once I graduated, I joined the Chernigov higher education pilot academy.

St. Petersburg is a wonderful city. You have wonderful parks, birds singing in the trees, manatees in the water, pelicans. So it's like this little paradise on Earth.

While I was in Astana, a ballet master from St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre staged a performance of 'Giselle' in the opera hall. It was one of only a few performances to grace Astana's concert spaces in many weeks, and tickets were impossible to come by.

It is apparent at first glance that in The Double there is more creative talent and depth of thought than in Poor Folk. But meanwhile the consensus of St. Petersburg readers is that this novel is intolerably long-winded and therefore terribly boring.

I've never been to St. Petersburg in my life.

St. Petersburg, under the czars, had been a grand city. It was a planned city, and it had - there were all these Parisian architects who had been brought in to build the apartment buildings in the center of town.

I was friends with Russians who said I should see Russia. I went there in '93 and it was so exciting, and I went to Siberia and had a great time.

St. Petersburg is a gem of world culture and Russia's most European city.

In February 2016, Russia arrested seven alleged ISIS militants who were plotting attacks in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The group included Russians and Central Asians and a ringleader who had come from Turkey.

For me, St. Petersburg is the city that I can never escape because it has this special energy, even a dark energy. It keeps pulling me back.

Russia hosts a lot of forums, including the International Economic Forum in St Petersburg, [usually in the beginning of summer], as well as the Economic Forum in Sochi.

I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.

I went to St. Petersburg - St. Petersburg is awesome.

People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.

'Russian Ark,' I adore - I almost cried at the end of that film, it's so beautiful.

I am joining the government not from the academic position but from St. Petersburg city council.