“When you're cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm.”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Quotes from book
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Original title
Один день Ивана Денисовича
(Russian, 1962)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir . The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s and describes a single day in the life of ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
“A man with two trades to his credit can easily learn another ten.”
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
“A man should build a house with his own hands before he calls himself an engineer.”
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
“A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
“Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
“In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
“You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
“Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
“Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live.”
Kuziomin, in the Ralph Parker translation (1963).
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
Context: Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. D’you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men’s left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates.
“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
