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.

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

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.

The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.

It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.