Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This autumn I learned from experience that a man can cross the threshold of death even when his body is still not dead. Your blood still circulates and your stomach digests, while you yourself have gone through the whole psychological preparation for death - and lived through death itself. Everything around you, you see as if from the grave. And although you've never counted yourself a Christian, indeed the very opposite sometimes, all of a sudden you find you've forgiven all those who trespassed against you and bear no ill-will towards those who persecuted you. You're simply indifferent to everyone and everything. There's nothing you'd put yourself out to change, you regret nothing. I'd even say it was a state of equilibrium, as natural as that of the trees and the stones.

the law of the taiga here, men. But a man can live here, just like anywhere else. Know who croaks first? The guy who licks out bowls, puts his faith in the sick bay, or squeals to godfather.”*

Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?

There is no worse moment than when you turn out for work parade in the morning. In the dark, in the freezing cold, with a hungry belly, and the whole day ahead of you. You lose the power of speech. You haven’t the slightest desire to talk to each other.

A convict’s thoughts are no freer than he is: they come back to the same place,

Easy money had no weight: you didn’t feel you’d earned it. What you get for a song you won’t have for long, the old folks used to say, and they were right. He still had a good pair of hands, hands that could turn to anything, so what was to stop him getting a proper job on the outside?

Easy money had no weight: you didn’t feel you’d earned it. What you get for a song you won’t have for long, the old folks used to say, and they were right. He still had a good pair of hands, hands that could turn to anything, so what was to stop him getting a proper job on the outside?