“At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest. ”

“Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

“How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it--but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or any one of its innumerable islands.Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis­placements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience,can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"And this is a question which, though repeated millions andmillions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer­sault from one state into another.We have been happily borne—or perhaps have unhappilydragged our weary way—down the long and crooked streets ofour lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood,rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never givena thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene­trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there iswhere the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards awayfrom us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous num­ber of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in thesefences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! Andall of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and fourwhite male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none­theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap,ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate toour past life, is slammed shut once and for all.That's all there is to it! You are arrested!And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblikebleat: "Me? What for?"That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow whichshifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible intoomnipotent actuality.That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first daywill you be able to grasp anything else.”

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.”

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

“Evidently, evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme danger or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.”

“Should a man,to preserve his life, pay everything that gives life colour,scentand excitement? Can one accept a life of digestion,respiration, muscularand brain activity-and nothingmore? 'Become a walking blueprint? Is this not anexorbitant price? Is it not a mockery? Should one pay? Seven years in the army and seven years in the camp,twice seven years twice that mythical or biblical term,then to be deprived of the ability to tell what is a man and what is a woman--is not a price extortionate?”