On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.
Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembere...
Facts have a tendency to obscure the truth.
On expensive dressmakers who made her luxurious dresses. But she was too mean to wear them: she saved them up at the back of her closet, and most of the time she wore an old mouse-colored housecoat.
The day life appeared on Earth, death appeared with it.
… just to break the silence. He always imagined that silence was somehow directed against him. Or that it was his fault.
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy...
Nasty thoughts are more like worms in the cauliflower!
Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me too to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent.
Closing your eyes to the cruelty of life is, in my opinion, both stupid and sinful. There's very little we can do about it. So we have to at least acknowledge it.
Love is a kind of infection, possessing then releasing you.
I now believe that all journeys are ridiculous: the only journey from which you don't always come back empty-handed is the journey inside yourself.
Once you have lifted your foot, do not be in a hurry to put it down again: who can tell what menacing nest of vipers you might step on.
They taught us always to respect other peoples: every man is made in the image of God, even if he has a tendency to forget it.
Only a woman has the power to choose whether or not to bestow.
There is no freedom about this: the world gives, and you just take what you're given, with no opportunity to choose.
Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you ch...
He reflects that Chekhov has already mapped out the route by which one can approach a strange lady by paying court to her lapdog.
Всеки от нас е полуостров, наполовина свързан със сушата, наполовина обърнат към океана. Едната ни половина е свързана здраво със семейството, приятелите, културата, местната традиция, нацията, пола,...
While it was true that books could change with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleas...