You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.

Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher's stone.

To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Byron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!

Life has gone by as if I never lived

Anna Petrovna: Never talk to women about your own good qualities. Let them find out for themselves.

If you cry 'forward', you must without fail make plain in what direction to go.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.