Thanks for sharing that great quote. Agree 100%. A couple of Sozhenitsyn books are on my long list of books to read that I may never get to in my lifetime. Snippets of his wisdom like this are a small consolation prize.
You can read One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich in a night, I stayed up all night reading it years ago. The Gulag is very long and more difficult, hard to put down but also so intense it’s better to put down in between readings.
PS - those are the only two books of his I have read. I should look and see what others I can fit in before I leave the world!