Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The brothers Arkady Strugatsky (28 August 1925 – 12 October 1991) and Boris Strugatsky (14 April 1933 – 19 November 2012) were Soviet and Russian science-fiction authors who collaborated through most of their careers.

See the Wikipedia article for the publication and translation history of the book

All page numbers are from the trade paperback edition, published by Chicago Review Press in 2012, using the translation by Olena Bormashenko, ISBN 978-1-61374-341-6, 4th printing.

Italics, ellipses, and capitalization as in the book

• That’s the Zone for you: come back with swag, a miracle; come back alive, success; come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck; and everything else—that’s fate.
  • Chapter 1 (p. 17)

• A man needs money in order to never think about it…
  • Chapter 2 (p. 82; repeated on p. 160)

• He didn’t know the driver, a new guy, some pimply beaked kid, one of the thousands who had recently flocked to Harmont looking for hair-raising adventures, untold riches, international fame, or some special religion; they came in droves but ended up as taxi drivers, waiters, construction workers, and bouncers in brothels—yearning, untalented, tormented by nebulous desires, angry at the whole world, horribly disappointed, and convinced that here, too, they’d been cheated.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 91)

• I wonder why we liked being praised. There’s no money in it. Fame? How famous could we get? He became famous: now he’s known to three.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 109)

• The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 126)

• Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can’t to do a thing! We can’t stop it, we can’t slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It’s not because we do bad work. And it’s not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn’t the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 127)

• “Your question falls under the umbrella of a pseudoscience called xenology. Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.”
  • Chapter 3 (p. 129)

• We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from the dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 130)

• Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 130)

• There’s a need to understand, but that doesn’t require knowledge. The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing…Give a man a highly simplified model of the world and interpret every event on the basis of this simple model. This approach requires no knowledge. A few rote formulas, plus some so-called intuition, some so-called practical acumen, and some so-called common sense.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 131)

• And you know, Richard, I’m a physicist and therefore a skeptic.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 138)

• In some sense, we’re all cavemen—we can’t imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality—that’s actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts…
  • Chapter 3 (p. 141)

• Scared, the eggheads. And maybe that’s how it should be. They should be even more scared than the rest of us ordinary folks put together. Because we merely don’t understand a thing, but they at least understand how much they don’t understand. They gaze into this bottomless pit and know that they will inevitably have to climb down—their hearts are racing, but they’ll have to do it—except they don’t know how or what awaits them at the bottom or, most important, whether they’ll be able to get back out.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 143)

• Sometimes I ask myself, Why the hell are we always in such a whirl? For the money? But why in the world do we need money, if all we ever do is keep working?
  • Chapter 3 (p. 146)

• “Look into my soul, I know—everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can’t be bad! The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other than those words of his—HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!”
  • Chapter 4 (p. 193; closing words)