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

Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.

You fall into my arms. You are the good gift of destruction's path, When life sickens more than disease And boldness is the root of beauty - Which draws us together.

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?

In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.