The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.

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

In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish." - Lara, from Doctor Zhivago

You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.