“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”

“Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel.”

“Everything on earth -- both the good things and the bad things -- is not given to a man according to his just deserts, but as a result of certain as yet unknown, yet logical, laws which I won't even undertake to suggest to you, although it sometimes seems to me that I feel them as through a glass darkly.”

“We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.”

“The queen gazes into the garden. There, near the trees, is a fountain; it is white in the darkness and tall, tall as a ghost. The queen hears, through the talk and the music, the soft splashing of its waters. She looks and thinks. You, Sirs, you are all noble, clever, rich, you throng round me, every one of my words is precious to you, you are all ready to die at my feet, you are my slaves.. But there, by the fountain, by the plashing water, he whose slave I am awaits me. He wears neither gorgeous raiment nor precious stones, no one knows him, but he await me, sure that I come – and I shall come –and there is no power in the world that can stop me when I want to go to him, to be with him, to lose myself with him there in the darkness of the garden, with the rustling of the trees and the murmur of the fountain …' Zinaida was silent.”

“But I had absolutely lost all sense of personal dignity, and could not tear myself away from the spectacle of my own misery.”

“Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.”