In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.

To make a face from marble means to remove from the slab everything that is not the face

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issuesnot from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and when he dies the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive... Everything that is unattainable for us now will one day be near and clear... But we must work.

It is always "Youth, youth," when there is nothing else to be said.