To tell the truth, this was one of the few cases in which she had not told him just what she was thinking. Usually, she let him know whatever thoughts happened to come to her, and indeed he never took it amiss if she let slip a word that might pain him, because when all was said and done that was the price one paid for sincerity.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

A mountaineer’s house, before being his home and the home of his family, is the home of God and of guests.

I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.

I could not understand how people could not like something as beautiful as the aerodrome. But I had lately become convinced that in general people were pretty boring. They liked to moan for hours on end about how hard it was to make ends meet, about the money they owed, the price of food, and other similar worries, but the minute some more brilliant or attractive subject come up, they were struck deaf.

In our city spring came from the sky, not from the soil, which was ruled by stone that recognizes no seasonal change. The change of the season could be glimpsed in the thinning of clouds, the appearance of the birds and the occasional rainbow.

If an animal has to be sacrificed when a new bridge is built, what will it take to build a whole new world?