Some of My Sentiments and Alexander Solzhenitsyn Quotes
Here are some Quotations from Russian writer Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, who has died at the age of 89 near Moscow and some of my
sentiments these days….
Please note: this is the final passage of the book
Shukhov
felt pleased with life as he went to sleep. A lot of good things had
happened that day. He hadn’t been thrown in the hole. The gang hadn’t
been dragged off to Sotsgorodok [settlement]. He’d swiped the extra
gruel at dinnertime. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He’d
enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn’t been caught with the blade at
the searchpoint. He’d earned a bit from Tsezar that evening. And he’d
bought his tobacco.
The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one.
Just one of the three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days of his sentence, from bell to bell.
The extra three were for leap years.
I
was feeling down in these past few days but compared to what this guy
had experience I am really better off. A text message from a friend
reminded me: We fail to be happy because we are not satisfied with
what we have. ..appreciate what you have and be thankful for whatever
things people give you… But I think there’s a deeper ache and
longing in my soul that only heaven can truly satisfy.
People
in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and
manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an
average person to understand without the help of an expert…
It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
Destructive
and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society
appears to have little defence against the abyss of human decadence,
such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against
young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror.
It
is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced
by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life
organised legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself
against the corrosion of evil.
extract from his speech at Harvard University, 1978
One
of the reason I feel down these days is the continuing corruption in
the government and the unending suffering of millions of my
countrymen. I long for a better Philippines. Years before I decided
not to leave the country because I want to see our country rise up from
degradation to a bright future. Now. I am one with the Psalmist
praying …How long Lord…will you forget me forever?..How long will
my enemy triumph over me?
I
can’t say that I wrote my books in order to open the eyes of the West
to what had been going on in the East. Above all, I wrote all my books
for the benefit of my own people, for the Russians, because [we]
ourselves don’t know our own history.
It’s not just the West
that doesn’t know our history; we ourselves have lost it. Recent
events, both pre- and post-Revolutionary, have been wiped out. The
documents have been burnt, the witnesses killed. So I have been working
to reconstruct the truth, all the truth about my own country, and this
is what I have done primarily for our own people’s benefit.
speaking to the BBC in 1974
There
is truth in the saying that the pen is mightier than the sword. i urge
all the Filipino writers out there to continue writing. To keep
reminding our people about who we really are. We are a people who have
a very short memory we do not learn from our past so we are as they say
bound to repeat the same mistakes our forefathers have made.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the single book which showed me the power of literature to change the world.
This
comment from Philip made me realize how powerful the written word is to
change the world. The Novels of Rizal ignited the Philippine
Revolution in our country. I think we need modern day "Rizals" to
ignite a new revolution that will transform the hearts and minds of the
Filipino people. I also now understand why God chose to give us his
message through the written word (and finally through the Incarnate
Word Jesus Christ) because of the power it has to change our heart and
mind.
I
never doubted that communism was doomed to collapse, but I was always
afraid of how Russia would emerge from that communism and at what
price. I know I am coming back to a worn-out, discouraged,
shell-shocked, Russia which has changed beyond recognition and is
wandering about in search of itself.
from a speech in Vladivostok on his return to Russia from exile in 1994
The main achievement is that Russia has revived its influence in the world.
But morally we are too far from what is needed. This cannot be achieved by the state, through parliamentarianism…
As far as the state, the public mind and the economy is concerned, Russia is still far away from the country of which I dreamed.
his last TV interview, 2007
I
agree with him and as you read his words about Russia you cannot help
but think about the Philippines… we are still far from the country of
which every Filipino longs for….
