It is always difficult, the transition from noisy refusal to humble acceptance.

I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has...

Talking to him is rather like talking to a school play.

There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments...

I mean, what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.

In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.

Things that are truly innocent don't need to be labelled as such.

I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive...

It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged...

what makes and ordinary person heroic is when they give up the thing they want most

In other words, I am the Brunette Who Keeps Her Head.

the number of books increased on the shelves neatly made for him by one of his carpenter friends. The room began to look like a home.

From lying, what is made in the soul is consolation, which causes a person to be convinced of his share in life. Lying is looking for an excuse to break the worker's arm. Lying blames a man for his...

I did not speak," continued Pavel, "about that good and gracious God in whom you believe, but about the God with whom the priests threaten us as with a stick, about the God in whose name they want to...

Mother remember that God created Adam like herself. So God is similar to man. But we now have no resemblance to God, but we look like wild animals! In the church, he shows us a scarecrow .... Yes, the...

What a row. A handful of idiots, hitting, strangling and crushing to protect their fateful authority over the people. The brutality increases, and cruelty becomes the law of existence, and I hope....

All parents wash away their sins with their tears; you are not the only one.

Every person is a saint, as long as Satan is asleep

But silence is terrible and painful only to those who have said all and have nothing more to speak of; but to those who never had anything to say--to them silence is simple and easy. . . .

What does that mean? He died .. and what died? Did my appreciation died for Agor? Did my feeling died towards him? Towards the companion? Did the memory of his ideas died? Did that work itself die?...

The pleasure of living carries with it the obligation to die.

One to become, against his will, is harmful ... in this fierce life

What drives them to persecute people to death is to keep their silver, gold and despicable financial papers, and all that miserable goods with which they can keep power over people - they do not...

However low he may fall, a man can never deny himself the delight of feeling cleverer, more powerful or even better fed than his companions.

Much later I realized that Russian people, because of the poverty and squalor of their lives, love to amuse themselves with sorrow--to play with it like children, and are seldom ashamed of being...

You are few ... You are the one who fights for the truth.

Why hungry while goodness accompanies? Why do I remain in ignorance while knowledge everywhere? The people began to revolt slowly

O farmers. Search for those papers and read them. Do not believe the authorities and the priests when they tell you that those who carry the truth to us are nothing but disobedience of disobedience....

Anger is like ice, and also quick to melt