It wasn't the sort of star that still gives light after being extinguished. It was the sort of star that shines, still shines with all its light, yet no one sees the light or needs it. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

(Vega) had this holiday feeling because she felt she was in the right. Suddenly your powerful arguments, unspoken because everywhere ridiculed & rejected, which are the terrible little thread you hang all alone over a terrible chasm, turn out to be a rope of steel wire. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

There was a festive air about everything in the room, especially the sun-bleached patch on the ceiling. The needle had to stay in a long time. The level of the blood had hardly dropped, indeed it didn’t drop at all. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

The large patch of sunlight in the ceiling, weak as though filtered through lace, formed an uneven circle. This patch, reflected off he didn't know what, was contributing to his happiness & beautifying the clean, quiet room. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

The sun was scorching his back as he sat there motionless, soaking in the March warmth, doing nothing, thinking nothing. He could sit blankly like that for a long time, gleaning the sun's warmth what had not been provided earlier in the bread & soup. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Unobtrusively she lifted finger and brushed aside a tear. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

Her ties in life, which had seemed so strong & permanent, were loosening and breaking...In the clinic and at home she was unique and irreplaceable. Now she was being replaced, We are so attached to the earth,and yet We are incapable of holding onto it. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

At the end of the last century Tolstoy decided to spread practical Christianity through society, but his ideals turned out to be impossible for his contemporaries to live with, his preaching had no link with reality. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

It's going too far to call it Christian. There are political parties that called themselves Christian Socialists in societies that emerged from under Hitler and Mussolini,but I can't imagine with what kind of people they undertook to build this kind of socialism. #solzhenitsyn25

His dressing gown hung on him like a pair of helpless wings. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

"The idols of the theater are the authoritative opinions of others which a man likes to accept as a guide when interpreting something he hasn't experienced himself." #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

A storm breaks trees, it only bends grass. Does this mean that the grass has betrayed the trees? Everyone has his own life. As you said yourself. the law of a nation is to survive." #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

When each of us dies and History stands over his grave and asks What was he? there'll only be one possible answet, Pushkin's: "In our vile times Man was, whatever his element, Either tyrant or traitor or prisoner!" #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

They executed people like you, but they made us stand up and applaud the verdicts as they were announced, And not just applaud, they made us demand the firing squad, demand it! #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

The meaning of existence was to preserve unspoiled, undisturbed and undistorted the image of eternity with which each person is born. Like a silver moon in a calm, still. pond. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

These "Honored Scientists" went about with a suite of followers, like some new Christ with his Apostles. They completely lost the right to make mistakes or not to know something, they lost the right to be allowed to think things over. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

"Soft words will break your bones, hard words will rouse your anger." #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

"Why do you keep cackling on about social origins like a witch doctor? You know what they used to say in the twenties? Show us your calluses! Why are your hands so white and puffy? Now that was Marxism!" #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

"Who do you mean by we'?" Kostoglotov scowled. His forelock was hanging over his face. "I mean us, our generation." "Well, why do you swallow all this talk about social origin then? That's not Marxism. It's racism." #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

Pavel Nikolayevich felt positively sick with fury, the helpless fury of a father who knows he can never pass his own inteligence is or efficiency on to a lout of a son. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

He wanted to get back as soon as possible to the place where he was loved and where people couldn't do without him. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

More knocking. His heart was knocking. His heart was banging against an iron door which ought never to open, but which was now for some reason emitting faint creaks. It was beginning to shake slightly, & rust was beginning to flake off the hinges. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

It wasn't the danger, no, it wasn't the danger that now threatened those who were left after (Stalin's) death__it was the ingratitude that wounded Rusanov most of all, as though his irreproachable record were what they were spitting on & trampling underfoot. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

He was a eagle owl, that's what he was. Rusanov at once recognized those fixed, round, completely immobile eyes. The ward was not a particularly merry place as it was, so the last thing they needed was this eagle owl. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

My friends, isn't this a fine picture of our lives as prisoners? We are given nothing to accomplish, doomed to ignominy, while the best left to us is a single reach of water which dried up, & the only memory of us will be 2 handfuls of water we hold out to each other... #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

His daughter had brought down an avalanche of joy on him today. He knew she'd taken her poems to Moscow, but from those typewritten sheets to a book w Alla Rusanova on the title page had seemed an impassably long distance. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Nowadays we don't think of man's love of an animal; we laugh at people who are attached to cats. But if we stop loving animals, aren't we bound to stop loving people too? #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Thecells of the heart which nature built for joy die through disuse. That small place in the breast which is faith's cramped quarters remains untenanted for years and decays. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Vadim put his book on the window sill. Cautiously using his hands to help him, he lowered his bad leg on the floor, then followed it w the other. Apart from the scarred leg which he nursed carefully, he looked like a ballet dancer as he walked toward the door. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Although Momma was responsible for the death sentence he was now under, hecould not reproach her, either to her face or behind her back. It was wrong to be too pragmatic, to judge people purely by results; it was more humane to judge by intentions. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

"All right, Aunt Grusha," said Pavel. "Write out your application & we'll arrange things. We'll fix it up for ur daughter. Now don't interrupt us anymore, we're going to purge the intelligentsia." #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25 m.youtube.com/watch?v=P4mz...

They sighed. The sighs came easily from them, two men who year in, vear out had had very little to cheer them. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

"Then why do you work as a librarian?" Rusanov called after him triumphantly. But once Shulubin stopped talking, he stopped talking. He Was silent as a tree stump. Pavel Nikolayevich had no respect for such men who had come down in the world_instead of going up. #Solzhenitsyn25

"Being determines consciousness."* A man's life had to be good and pleasant to give him the right kind of consciousness. To quote the words of Gorky, "A healthy mind in a healthy body,'" #Solzhenitsyn25 *This saying of Karl Marx has become a proverb in communist countries.

"He has to know verything, doesn't he?" said Vera Kornilyevna, shaking her head from side to side. "These days our patients are so educated, we'll be handing them over our white coats soon." #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

"He has to know everything, doesn't he?" said Vera Kornilyevna, shaking her head from side to side. "These days our patients are so educated, we'll be handing them over our white coats soon." #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

"When you're young you haven't the experience, when you're old you haven't the strength." #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

In the 1950s, Russian shopping centers were state-run department stores in large cities & smaller shops in towns, with limited selection & frequent shortages. GUM & Tsum existed, offering a wide array of goods. Smaller stores were often cramped, drab, & had long queues. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

Everything was discussed in euphemisms and half-allusions (sometimes even in substitutes for substitutes), or else in a way that was in direct antithesis to the truth. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

He had a head of white hair, the sort of hair that gives a man of a certain age, whether genius or fool, saint or rascal, man-of-action or idler, an aura of calm nobility. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

GUM: the biggest department store in Moscow. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard gumrussia.com

Yet every day we swallow food and lick our fingers in this respect we are unyielding. If we`re not fed for two days we go out of our minds. we start climbing up the wall. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

It was simply that we grow dull with the passing years. We grow tired. We lose_ all true talent for grief or for faithfulness. We surrender to time. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

He wasn't wounded. He didn't go into hospital or on leave. He was simply killed. He was dead but his star burned, it kept burning ... But its light was wasted. #Solzhenitsyn25 #CancerWard

She had this holiday feeling because she felt she was in the right. Suddenly your powerful arguments, unspoken because everywhere ridiculed and rejected,which are the little thread by which you hang all alone over a terrible chasm, turn out to be a rope of steel wire. #Solzhenitsyn25

Pain was shooting from his neck right into his head, ceaselessly. It had started to throb evenly, in four-beat time, and each beat of the bar was hammering out: "Yefrem_Podduyev_Dead_Stop. Yefrem_Podduyev_Dead_Stop." #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

His fate lay there, btwn his chin & his collar bone. There justice was being done. And in answer to this justice he could summon no friend, no past services, no defense. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

With it's help Rusanov suceeded in making several women divorce their husbands, who were imprisoned under Article 58. *Article 58 covered a wide range of counter-revolutionary crimes. Treason, armed uprising, wrecking, & acts seen as aiding international bourgeoisie. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25

PN was not afraid of any of them. He had helped establish the guilt of them all, more boldly & openly as time went on. On 2 occasions he had gone to the confrontation, raised his voice & denounced them. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25 scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/cgi/viewcont...

When he woke next it was in the middle of the night & the place was dark & silent. He felt that sleep had vanished forever. It's beneficent veil had slipped away from him. But terror, in full measure, clamped on to the middle of his chest & held it in a vice. #CancerWard #Solzhenitsyn25