“You have the survival instincts of a suicidal squirrel”

“Just give me a bit, let me pretend you're still alive," Andrei said hoarsely. "Let me pretend that I don't have to give you up.""Andrei," Warm, calloused hands cupped Anrei's face. "Look at me. I'm real. I'm still with you. A part of me will always be with you. Even after I go through that doorway.”

“If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie”

“It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.”

“Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.”

“The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance. I strive to retrace my life to find in it some plan, following a vein of lead, or of gold, or the course of some subterranean stream, but such devices are only tricks of perspective in the memory.”