“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday.Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear.”

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”

“… What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.”

“You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”

“And as soon as you have renounced that aim of "surviving at any price" and gone where the calm and simple people go—then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you. And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings. Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you—and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels—patience. You are acending...Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgements. You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another's strength. And wish to possess it yourself. The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending...With the year, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capability for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash over with gladness over good tidings, nor do they darken with grief. For you still have to verify whether that's how it is going to be. And you also have to work out—what is gladness and what is grief. And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost.Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens with suffering. And even if you haven't come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you.”

“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.”

“My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.”