“To literature today the plane surface of daily life is what the earth is to an airplane — a mere runway from which to take off, in order to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the fantastic.”
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: The formal character of a living literature is the same as its inner character: it denies verities; it denies what everyone knows and what I have known until this moment. It departs from the canonical tracks, from the broad highway. … To literature today the plane surface of daily life is what the earth is to an airplane — a mere runway from which to take off, in order to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the fantastic. Let yesterday's cart creak along the well-paved highways. The living have strength enough to cut away their yesterday.
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Yevgeny Zamyatin 34
Russian author 1884–1937Related quotes
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 65–66

Sky-Prospect from the Plain of France.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”

“The advanced life of virtue,” Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (1995), p. 314