In the end dreams became his life, and his whole life thereafter took a strange turn: one might say he slept while waking and watched while asleep.

Do we ever get what we really want? Do we ever achieve what our powers have ostensibly equipped us for? No: everything works by contraries.

The Lord grant we may all be tillers of the soil.

Of course, Alexander the Great was a hero, but why smash the chairs?

Steeds, steeds, what steeds! Has the whirlwind a home in your manes?

it's not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.

Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.