But you can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. ("The North")
Interpretation
The quote expresses the inevitability of change and the passage of time, particularly how seasons transition from autumn to winter.
In this quote, Yevgeny Zamyatin reflects on the relentless nature of change and the inevitability of the cycles of life. Autumn, with its beauty and vibrancy, cannot be pleaded with to remain, as it must yield to the approaching winter. The midnight wind symbolizes the forces that drive change, reminding us that we cannot halt the progression of time or manipulate the seasons of our lives.
In practice
During a speech about personal growth, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of accepting change.
The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox - the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.
The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...
The lilac branches are bowed under the weight of the flowers: blooming is hard, and the most important thing is - to bloom. (βA Story About The Most Important Thingβ)
A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.
Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back. _x000D_ Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person - nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need.
When we uncovered the Hinkley case, there were so many other cases like it, and they're just catching up. And we're just starting to see the damage. I was hoping by now there would be more transparency and less defeat and cover-up. I haven't seen much of that change.
I dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.
At the beginning of the 60's our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country. We kidded ourselves a while, we said: 'They won't stay, sometime they will be gone.' But this isn't reality.
The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.
Ten years have passed since a perfect blue sky morning turned into the blackest of nights. Since then we've lived in sunshine and in shadow, and although we can never unsee what happened here, we can also see that children who lost their parents have grown into young adults, grandchildren have been born and good works and public service have taken root to honor those we loved and lost.
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