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.

My love is like a stone tied round my neck; it's dragging me down to the bottom; but I love my stone. I can't live without it.

I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.

...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.

It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.

A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.