Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

As before the collapse, the setting sun brushed the tiles, brought out the warm brown glow on the wallpaper, and hung the shadow of the birch on the wall as if it were a woman's scarf.

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

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned.

That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.

He is her glory. Any woman could say it. For every one of them, God is in her child. Mothers of great men must have been familiar with this feeling, but then, all women are mothers of great men -- it isn't their fault if life disappoints them later.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.