“But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an unhealed and frequently reopened wound.”

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

Mother Russia is on the move, she can’t stand still, she’s restless and can’t find rest, she’s talking and she can’t stop.

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

If it’s so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.

They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people’s songs.

Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

Only the solitary seek the truth, and they break with all those who don’t love it sufficiently.

The whole wide world is a cathedral; I stand inside, the air is calm, And from afar at times there reaches My ear the echo of a psalm.

We must discover security within ourselves.

That’s metaphysics, my dear fellow. It’s forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won’t take it.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

The unarmed power of naked truth.

The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.

An unshared happiness is not happiness.

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.

The man to solitude accustom’d long, Perceives in everything that lives a tongue; Not animals alone, but shrubs and trees Have speech for him, and understood with ease,

Our species in general had grown accustomed to pain and adversity through millennia of struggle, we were only recently evolving the ability to let ourselves feel good and have things go well for any significant period of time.

The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.

Probably the undertaker thinks less of death than almost any other man. He is so accustomed to it that his mind must involuntarily turn from its horror to a contemplation of how much he makes out of the burial.

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.