Yevgeny Zamyatin

“ Somehow I felt they should not lie there on the floor and be trodden upon. I gathered a handful of them, put them on the table, and carefully smoothed them out, glanced at them, and laughed aloud! I never knew it before but now I know—and you, too, know—that laughter may be of different colors. Laughter is but a distant echo of an explosion within us; it may be the echo of a holiday—red, blue, and golden fireworks—or at times it may represent pieces of human flesh exploded into the air. . . .
I noticed an unfamiliar name on some of the pink checks. ”

“ Through the glass of the walls in quite a few houses (this cut into my mind) , I saw male and female Numbers in shameless embraces—without curtains lowered, without pink checks, in the middle of the day! . . .
The house—her house; the door ajar. The lobby, the control desk, all were empty. The elevator had stopped in the middle of its shaft. I ran panting up the endless stairs. ”

“ And at once the tables, the walls, the plates, even the air, trembled and rang; outside, too, an enormous, iron, round roar reaching the sky-floating over heads and houses, it died away in the distance in small, hardly perceptible circles like those upon water. ”