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The Silver Dove QUOTES

The Silver Dove QUOTES

1 " If you fall for a dark-eyed beauty, pretty as a picture, with lips as sweet as a luscious rasberry, and a gentle face, unrumpled by kisses, like an apple-blossom petal in May, and she becomes your love—then do not say that love is yours: even though you cannot tire of her rounded breasts, of her slender frame that melts in your embrace like wax before a flame. . . . The day will come, that cruel hour will come, the fatal moment will come, when he face will fade, rumpled by kisses, her breasts will no longer quiver at your touch: all this will come to pass; and you will be alone with your own shadow amidst the sunscorched deserts and the dried up springs, where flowers do not bloom and the sunlight plays on the dry skin of a lizard; and you might even see the hairy black tarantula’s lair, all enmeshed in the threads of its web . . . And then your thirsting voice will be raised from the sands, calling longingly to your homeland.
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But if your love is otherwise, if her browless face has once been touched by the black blemish of the pox, if her hair is red, her breasts sagging, her bare feet dirty, and to any extent at all her stomach protrudes, and still she is your love—then that which you have sought and found in her is the sacred homeland of your soul. "

― Andrei Bely , The Silver Dove

2 " Oh, to live in the fields, to die in the fields, repeating to yourself the one spirit-strewing word, which no one knows but he who receives that word; and it is received in silence. Here amongst themselves they all drink the wine of life, the wine of new joy — thought Piotr; the sunset here cannot be compressed into a book, and here the sunset is a mystery; in the West there are many books; in Russia there are many unspoken words. Russia is that on which the book is smashed, knowledge dissipated, and life itself burns up; on the day when the West is grafted onto Russia, a world-wide conflagration will engulf it: everything will burn that can burn, for only from the ashes of death will rise the soul of paradise, the Fire-bird. "

― Andrei Bely , The Silver Dove

3 " The rain had stopped: again the sun gleamed for a moment; Gugolevo appeared before him, opened itself out, enclosed him in its blossoming embrace—and now it was looking at him, Gugolevo; looking at him with the lucent waters of its lake, Gugolevo; and the lake was rocking him with its dove-blue waters which sang with silver, and all the while the rippling lake was reaching out to the bank with its waters—but it could not reach: and whispered with the reeds—and there, in the lake, was Gugolevo: it rose behind the trees in its entirety, then gazed with a smile of longing at the water—and escaped into the water: there it was now, in the water—over there, over there. "

― Andrei Bely , The Silver Dove