Yevgeny Zamyatin — We [437]

You know that pink, transparent, warm gold, when the very air is faintly rosy and everything is suffused with the delicate blood of the sun, everything is alive: the stones are alive and soft; iron is alive and soft; people are alive, and everyone is smiling. — Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 437

Note

Lyrical expansion of sensory detail that equates inanimate materials with organic pulse, establishing the narrator’s split perception between mechanical dystopia and a newly awakened, feverish romanticism.