But how do I get to having to write a book?... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!

... all professional ideologies are high-minded. Hunters, for instance, would not dream of calling themselves the butchers of the woods.

Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.

It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves. And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream - the life that now lay open before him.

Each person is a graveyard of his thoughts. They are most beautiful for us in the moment of their birth; later we can often sense a deep pain that they leave us indifferent where earlier they enchanted us.

Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.

A politician who climbs high over the bodies of the slain is described as vile or great according to the degree of his success.