Yevgeny Zamyatin — We [1215]

I had never known this before, but now I know it, and you know it: laughter can be of different colors. It is only an echo of a distant explosion within you. It may be festive—red, blue, and golden fireworks; or—torn fragments of a human body flying up. … — Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1215

Note

A philosophically dark and sharp meditation on human affect that reinterprets laughter not as joy, but as shrapnel from internal violence.