Isaak Babel - Quotes

Quotes

• "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."
• "Over the town roamed the homeless moon. I went along with her, warming up in my heart impracticable dreams and discordant songs."
• Benya Krik: "This is my idea: A Jew no longer in the prime of life, a Jew who used to go about naked, barefoot, and filthy like a convict on Sakhalin Island! And now, thank God, he's getting up there in years, it is time to put an end to this life sentence of hard labor—it is time to turn the Sabbath into Sabbath.
  • From the 1926 play Sunset (play)
• Rabbi Ben Zkharia: "Jews! Day is day, and night is night. Day drenches us with the sweat of our toil, but night offers its fans of Divine coolness. Joshua, the son of Nun, who stopped the sun, was nothing but a crazed fool! ...And here is Mendel Krik, a member of our synagogue, who has turned out to be no cleverer than Joshua, son of Nun. He wanted to warm himself in the sun all his life, all his life he wanted to stand where he stood at midday. But God has policemen on every corner, and Mendel Krik has sons in his house. The policemen come and see to it that things are as they should be. Day is day, and night is night. Jews! Everything is as it should be! Let's down a glass of vodka!"
  • From the play Sunset.
• "He can write, but he's got nothing to say."
  • Remarking to Ilya Ehrenburg about the promise shown by the White emigre and acclaimed author Vladimir Nabokov.
• "If it was up to me, I wouldn't ask my worst enemy to clean floors after the Revolution! During the Revolution the dirt grew to three inches thick on these floors -- you couldn't shave it off with a plane! I should get a medal for cleaning floors after the Revolution, and all you do is bark."
  • From the 1935 play Maria (play).
• Captain Viskovsky: "Who knows what can happen, Yasha? They might ask you to blow up the street you were born on, and you would blow it up. Or to blast an orphanage to bits, and you'd say, "A two-zero-eight fuse," and blast that orphanage to bits. That's what you would do, Yasha, as long as they let you live your life, strum your guitar, and sleep with thin women. You're fat but you like them thin. You'll do anything, if they tell you to renounce your mother three times, you would renounce her three times. But that's not the point, Yasha! The point is they will want more: they won't let you drink vodka with the people you like, they'll make you read boring books, and the songs they teach you will be boring, too. Then you'll be mad, my dear Red Artillerist. You'll be furious, your eyes will start rolling! Then two citizens will come visiting: "Let's go, Comrade Kravchenko." "Should I take any personal effects with me or not," you'll ask them. "No, you needn't take any personal effects with you. It'll be a quick interrogation, over in a minute." And that will be the end of you, my dear Red Artillerist. It'll cost them four kopecks. It's been calculated that a Colt bullet costs four kopecks and not a centime more."
  • A White Army officer turned gangster lectures a corrupt Red Guard about the pitfalls of the new Soviet Union. From the 1935 play Maria.