“As Pushkin put it: He had no itch to dig for glories deep in the dirt that time has laid.”

“The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort.”

“[...] he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years."That's the only kind of book I can trust", he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”

“Your problem is that your shadow is a bit - how should I put it? Faint. I thought this the first time I laid eyes on you, that the shadow you cast on the ground is only half as dark as that of ordinary people… What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow”

“The things we try our hardest not to lose, we really just put deep abysses in the spaces between them.”

“But even though I was with my father again, I never felt really secure deep down. I don't know how to put it exactly, but things were never really settled inside me. I always had this feeling like, I don't know, like somebody was putting something over on me, like my real father had disappeared forever and, to fill the gap, some other guy was sent to me in his shape.”

“Time came slowly and passed slowly, so leisurely that at times he could swear it had stealthily doubled back on itself.”