“People as old and powerful as he should never be given someone to love. For Anna he would destroy the world.”

“As the ironist does not have the new within his power, it might be asked how he destroys the old, and to this it must be answered: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself.”

“I told them," he said in a clear, carrying voice, "that they should not give someone as old and powerful as I a daughter to love. That it would end badly.”

“He never forgot what he learned and that was to love is to destroy and to be love is to be the one destroyed.”

“He meditated on the use to which he should put all the energy of youth which comes to a man only once in life. Should he devote this power, which is not the strength of intellect or heart or education, but an urge which once spent can never return, the power given to a man once only to make himself, or even – so it seems to him at the time – the universe into anything he wishes: should he devote it to art, to science, to love, or to practical activities? True, there are people who never have this urge: at the outset of life they place their necks under the first yoke that offers itself, and soberly toil away in it to the end of their days.”

“And he knew at that moment that love world never die, that it would never fade away altogether. The time might come when he would meet and marry someone else. He might even be reasonably happy. But there would always be a deep precious place in his heart that belonged to his first real love.”