Leningrad Quotes

• And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Skirts, Eyelids, Streets

  "Deathless". Book by Catherynne M. Valente, March 29, 2011.

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• The duality of St Petersburg and Leningrad remains. They are not even on speaking terms.

  Joseph Wechsberg

  Duality, Term, Remains

  Joseph Wechsberg (1977). “In Leningrad”, Doubleday Books

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• And so my child and I came to this place to meet him eye to eye and face to face. He made my daughter laugh, then we embraced. We never knew what friends we had, until we came to Leningrad.

  Billy Joel

  Daughter, Children, Eye

  Song: Leningrad, Album: Storm Front, 1989

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• Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.

  Paullina Simons

  Wall, Fall, Night

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• Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

  Jan Morris

  Russia, Cities, Timelessness

  Jan Morris (2011). “A Writer's World”, p.185, Faber & Faber

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• [State] finds [frontier] either with the aid of force, as in 1914, when Germany invaded Belgium in order to deal a blow against France or it "borrows" a frontier, such as Germany did with regard to Latvia, for instance, in 1918, in attempting to break through to Leningrad across Latvia.

  Joseph Stalin

  Blow, Order, Break Through

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• If we're so awful and we're so bad, you ought to check out the nightlife in Leningrad.

  Glenn Frey

  Nightlife, Politics, Awful

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• Falling in love with you in the Summer Garden in the white nights in Leningrad is the moment that propels me through life.

  Paullina Simons

  Summer, Falling In Love, Love You

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• Moscow, Rome, London, Paris stay in place. Leningrad and New York float, spreading all their sails, cutting space with their prows, and can disappear, if not in reality, then in the imagination of the poet creating a myth, a mythical tradition on the grounds of his secret experience.

  Nina Berberova

  New York, Cutting, Reality

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• The development and deployment of drones and Cruise missiles involves the continuing development of the vision machine. Research on Cruise missiles is intrinsically linked to the development of vision machines. The aim, of course, is not only to give vision to a machine but, as in the case of the Cruise missiles that were aimed at Leningrad and Moscow, also to enable a machine to deploy radar readings and pre-programmed maps as it follows its course towards its target.

  Paul Virilio

  Reading, Giving, Deployment

  Source: ctheory.net

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• It's a little hard to avoid putting both war and politics in, in that they both come into the activity, but on their own. My basic idea is to do a great love film set in the hell of 1942. At that moment, hell was Leningrad. Underneath all this, of course, is a film about dissension between the two most important countries in the world, the United States and the Soviet Union. I think it is a must at this point to talk about cooperation instead of the rancor and hatred and competition between nations.

  Sergio Leone

  Country, War, Thinking

  Source: www.americansuburbx.com

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• I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Mother, Art, Russia

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me . . . and asked me in a whisper . . . "Can you describe this?" And I said: "I can."

  Anna Akhmatova

  Years, Waiting In Line, One Day

  Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, Stanley Kunitz, Max Hayward (1997). “Избранные Стихи”, p.99, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Each day brought just another minute of the things they could not leave behind. Jane Barrington sitting on the train coming back to Leningrad from Moscow, holding on to her son, knowing she had failed him, crying for Alexander, wanting another drink, and Harold, in his prison cell, crying for Alexander, and Yuri Stepanov on his stomach in the mud in Finland, crying for Alexander, and Dasha in the truck, on the Ladoga ice, crying for Alexander, and Tatiana on her knees in the Finland marsh, screaming for Alexander, and Anthony, alone with his nightmares, crying for his father.

  Paullina Simons

  Father, Son, Knowing

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• We’ll meet again in Lvov, my love and I…” Tatiana hums, eating her ice cream, in our Leningrad, in jasmine June, near Fontanka, the Neva, the Summer Garden, where we are forever young.

  Paullina Simons

  Summer, Garden, June

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• During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there): ‘Could you describe this?’ I said, ‘I can!’ Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

  Anna Akhmatova

  Blue, Numbness, Years

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