“There comes a time when a man finds himself in front of a dark uncrossable abyss, which he himself has spent years digging. He cannot go forward, and has no way back. Words have failed, tears won't help, and who would he call out to? He can't even remember his own name. Then the man sees that on this god's green earth there is but one true suffering: the torment of guilty conscience.”

“All at once, in his dangerous position, Ćorkan felt himself separated from his companions. He was now like some gigantic monster above them. His first steps were slow and hesitating. His heavy clogs kept slipping on the stones covered with ice. It seemed to him that his legs were failing him, that the depths below attracted him irresistibly, that he must slip and fall, that he was already falling. But his unusual position and the nearness of great danger gave him strength and hitherto unknown powers. [...] Instead of walking, he began to dance, he himself did not know how, as free as if he had been on a wide green field and not on that narrow and icy edge.All of a sudden he felt himself light and skilful as a man sometimes in dreams. His heavy and exhausted body felt without weight. The drunken Ćorkan danced and floated above the depths as if on wings. [...] His dance bore him onward where his walk would never have borne him- No longer thinking of the danger of the possibility of a fall, he leapt from one leg to the other and sang with outstretched arms as accompanying himself on a drum.”

“To be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts - one's own and those of others - which so often exceed one's capacities? And what is more, to endure one's own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.”

“Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.”

“It seems to me, that if people only knew how hard it was for me to endure life, they would find it easier to forgive me for all the wrong things I’ve done and all the good things that I have failed to do. And they would still find a little compassion within them to pity me.”

“He who is not delicate flower of your soul to the winds of temptation, whatever it whole and saved and passed on to the end, it's as if it never had.”

“What can and doesn't have to be always, at the end, surrenders to something that has to be.”