All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.

As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.

Good-bye... why am I hemorrhaging ?

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 not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.