He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life.

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

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?--Ah, there you are!" - Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago.