St Petersburg Quotes

1. "Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities. The lack of detail about the destinations served only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, St Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Grand Cayman via Nassau … all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation."
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "I am joining the government not from the academic position but from St. Petersburg city council."
Author: Anatoly Chubais

3. "For me, St. Petersburg is the city that I can never escape because it has this special energy, even a dark energy. It keeps pulling me back."
Author: Anna Netrebko

4. "Bir de benim gibi zavalli hayalperestin hayatina bak! Öldüresiye monoton, gölgelerin, hayallerin, uydurma düsüncelerin tutsagi bir hayat. Kalbi çekilmez iskencelerle dolduran, hep kara bulutlarla kapli, günes yüzü görmemis bir hayat! Oysa bu zavalli Petersburglunun da herkes gibi günese ihtiyaci var; günessiz görülmüs rüyalarin bile degeri yok! Isin en acisi, en sonunda hayal alemi de o çok güvendigimiz, sonsuz sandigimiz alem- yavas yavas yorulmaya, eski canliligini kaybetmeye basliyor. Bütün rüyalarimizi üstüne kurdugumuz düsünceler eskimeye baslayip, yerine yenilerini de koyamayinca, hayal alemi de yikilip yerle bir oluyor ve geride kala kala çali çirpi ve toz kaliyor fakat yasayabileceginiz tek hayat hayal alemiyse, sizi bekleyen baska bir hayat yoksa, ne yapacaksiniz?"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

5. "... in St. Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe. (Cities and be intentional or unintentional."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

6. "Listen, listen!" I interrupted her. "Forgive me if I tell you something else.... I tell you what, I can't help coming here to-morrow, I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help going over such moments again in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year. I shall certainly come here to-morrow, just here to this place, just at the same hour, and I shall be happy remembering today. This place is dear to me already. I have already two or three such places in Petersburg. I once shed tears over memories ... like you.... Who knows, perhaps you were weeping ten minutes ago over some memory.... But, forgive me, I have forgotten myself again; perhaps you have once been particularly happy here...."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

7. "Vronsky is one of the sons of Count Kirill Ivanovitch Vronsky, and one of the finest specimens of the gilded youth of Petersburg."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

8. "He was a passionate adherent of the new ideas and of Speransky, and the busiest purveyor of news in Petersburg, one of those men who choose their opinions like their clothes—according to the fashion—but for that very reason seem the most vehement partisans"
Author: Leo Tolstoy

9. "When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired."
Author: Tadashi Shoji

10. "St. Petersburg is a gem of world culture and Russia's most European city."
Author: Valentina Matviyenko

11. "Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least what journalists term "great books," is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's "Ulysses"; Kafka's "Transformation"; Bely's "St. Petersburg," and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, "In Search of Lost Time."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

12. "I need but say that my most vivid impression in that respect was a mere trifle: one day, on Million Street in St. Petersburg, a truck packed with jolly rioters made a clumsy but accurate swerve so as to deliberately squash a passing cat which remained lying there, as a perfectly flat, neatly ironed, black rag (only the tail still belonged to a cat -- it stood upright, and the tip, I think, still moved). At the time this struck me with some deep occult meaning, but I have since have occasion to see a bus, in a bucolic Spanish village, flatten by exactly the same method an exactly similar cat, so I have become disenchanted with hidden meanings."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

St Petersburg Quotes Pictures