“Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it's pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.”

“Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.”

“In our country they do not permit any information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably suppressed at the very beginning, so no ray of light should fall on the naked body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole decades, until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty blocks from all this trash are lost.”

“Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not? What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?”

“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.”

“By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives.”

“On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.”