“You're not racing?" joked the officer."Mine is a harder race," Alexei Alexandrovich replied respectfully.And though the reply did not mean anything, the officer pretended that he had heard a clever phrase from a clever man and had perfectly understood.”

“Alexei Alexandrovich stood face to face with life, confronting the possibility of his wife loving someone else besides him, and it was this that seemed so senseless and incomprehensible to him, because it was life itself. All his lief Alexei Alexandrovich had lived and worked in spheres of services that dealt with reflections of life. And each time he had encountered life itself, he had drawn back from it. Now he experienced a feeling similar to what a man would feel who was calmly walking across a bridge over an abyss and suddenly saw that the bridge had been taken down and below him was the bottomless deep. This bottomless deep was life itself, the bridge the artificial life that Alexei Alexandrovich had lived.”

“You think you’re a very clever fellow, don’t you?” Saldur challenged.“No, Your Grace,” Merrick replied. “Clever is the man who makes a fortune selling dried-up cows, explaining how it saves the farmers the trouble of getting up every morning to milk them. I’m not clever—I’m a genius.”

“A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»”

“If I worked at White Globe Consulting, I wouldn't be able to do my job. I would spend all day texting the other people in the office, asking them what was going on today and had they heard anything new and what did they think was going to happen.Hmm. Maybe it's a good thing I'm not in an office job.”

“That is very true," replied Elizabeth, "and I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”