“All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.”

Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.

If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.

During the last years of Mayakovski’s life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.

In this era of world wars, in this atomic age, values have changed. We have learned that we are guests of existence, travelers between two stations. We must discover security within ourselves.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.

No bad man can be a good poet.

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.

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

I used to be very revolutionary, but now I think that nothing can be gained by brute force. People must be drawn to good by goodness.

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.

Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.

He comes as a guest to the feast of existence, and knows that what matters is not how much he inherits but how he behaves at the feast, and what people remember and love him for.

When you come out of the theatre and you don’t even talk about that film or remember it, then it disappoints me.

Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.

I love women. I actually prefer girls, as a parent, because they disappoint at a different age. They go through that, “Dad’s an idiot,” which lasted a little longer than I’d like.

Are disappointing patterns just patterns only? Or are they a mockery of your stupidity?

Try to not be disappointed in anything. Know that life is showing up perfectly in every moment. Today’s disappointment could be tomorrow’s springboard to all that you’ve ever wanted. In fact, it probably is.

So much about living life, to me, is about humility and gratitude. And I’ve tried very hard to have those qualities and be that person and I’m just so disappointed in myself that I allowed it to slip.

When something disappointing happened, my mother would remind me not to let that become my focus. There’s still so much to be grateful for.

Set your goals then disappoint yourself then try again! Never stop trying!