“In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men.”

—  Whittaker Chambers , Witness

Source: Witness (1952), p. 25

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep with…" by Whittaker Chambers?
Whittaker Chambers photo
Whittaker Chambers 33
Defected Communist spy 1901–1961

Related quotes

Neal Stephenson photo

“Neither of us said a word as we picked our way down the path for the next quarter of an hour, and the sky receded to a deep violet. I had the illusion that, as it got darker, it moved away from us, expanding like a bubble, rushing away at a million light-years an hour, and as it whooshed past stars, we began to see them.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Part 8, "Orithena"
Anathem (2008)

Renée Vivien photo

“I'm not logical. I'm infected with the romantic fever. It began in my teens when I read Baudelaire in secret, in a country boarding school in England from which I slipped away by climbing over the wall. I was fifteen, the same age as Juliet--a Juliet for whom Romeo had no attraction.”

Renée Vivien (1877–1909) British poet who wrote in the French language

Quoted in Mercure de France, I-XII (1953), trans. Jeannette H. Foster (1977)

“As I twirled, cha-cha-ed and clapped my hands to the beat, I began to remember, for the first time in a long time, those moments I used to steal as a kid, dancing alone in my room with headphones on. Those fleeting moments when what I looked like didn’t matter, only what I felt. Only this time, I wasn’t a child anymore. There was no one who could burst in unannounced, laugh at me, punish me, force me to stop. I felt so free, so beautiful, in a way I had written off as impossible for me long ago. … My inner dancer began to emerge from the deep pit where I had kept her all this time. I found the girlhood I was never allowed.”

Kai Cheng Thom (1991) writer

What I learned, loved and lost as a trans Zumba addict (2018)

Suzanne Collins photo

“Underground. Which I hate. Like mines and tunnels and 13. Underground, where I dread dying, which is stupid because even if I die aboveground, the next thing they'll do is bury me underground anyway.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Glen Cook photo

“I began to back away.
This is how I handle my women. Duck for cover when they get distressed.”

Glen Cook book Shadow Games

Source: Shadow Games (1989), Chapter 5, “Chains of Empire” (p. 31)

“This was the beginning of something, yet I had ventured back into a world from which I had come and found it an alien world of which I was no longer a part.  In a sense I had always been alien. My Druidic training had taken me deep into a past that held more than the present, and along with it had been my father’s accounts, returning home after voyages, of a world beyond our shores. I had mingled with the men of his crews, almost half of which had come from other lands, other cultures, until I had become a stranger in my own land.”

Louis L'Amour book The Walking Drum

Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 31

Clarence Thomas photo

“I began to suspect that Daddy had been right all along: the only hope I had of changing the world was to change myself first.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 60
2000s, (2008)

Richelle Mead photo

“I brought my lips down to hers, and it was like everything that had ever happened to me had simply been a warm-up for this moment, that this was where my life truly began.”

Richelle Mead book The Fiery Heart

Source: The Fiery Heart

William Hazlitt photo

“I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"Common Places," No. 60, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)

Vachel Lindsay photo

“Whenever I begin to write a poem or draw a picture I am, in imagination, if not in reality, back in my room where I began to draw pen-and-ink pictures and write verses in my seventeenth year.”

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) American poet

What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)
Context: Whenever I begin to write a poem or draw a picture I am, in imagination, if not in reality, back in my room where I began to draw pen-and-ink pictures and write verses in my seventeenth year. Both windows of the room look down on the great Governor’s Yard of Illinois. This yard is a square block, a beautiful park. Our house is on so high a hill I can always look down upon the governor. Among my very earliest memories are those of seeing old Governor Oglesby leaning on his cane, marching about, calling his children about him.

Related topics