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

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

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

If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself.

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 unarmed power of naked truth.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.