“A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good.”

“I remember the old northern legend of how God created the taiga while he was still a child. There were few colors, but they were childishly fresh and vivid, and their subjects were simple. Later, when God grew up and became an adult, he learned to cut out complicated patters from his pages and created many bright birds. God grew bored with his former child's world and he threw snow on his forest creation and went south forever.”

“Life repeats Shakespearian themes more often than we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale?”

“We realized that life, even the worst of life, consists of an alternation of joys and sorrow, successes and failure more than the successes.”

“Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friend.”

“There is a much that a man should not see, should not know, and if he should see it, it is better for him to die.”

“And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.”