“Qu’est-ce que le roman, en effet, sinon cet univers où l’action trouve sa forme, où les mots de la fin sont prononcés, les êtres livrés aux êtres, où toute vie prend le visage du destin. Le monde romanesque n’est que la correction de ce monde-ci, suivant le désir profond de l’homme. Car il s’agit bien du même monde. La souffrance est la même, le mensonge et l’amour. Les héros ont notre langage, nos faiblesses, nos forces. Leur univers n’est ni plus beau ni plus édifiant que le nôtre. Mais eux, du moins, courent jusqu’au bout de leur destin, et il n’est même jamais de si bouleversants héros que ceux qui vont jusqu’à l’extrémité de leur passion.[…] Voici donc un monde imaginaire, mais créé par la correction de celui-ci, un monde où la douleur peut, si elle le veut, durer jusqu’à la mort, où les passions ne sont jamais distraites, où les êtres sont livrés à l’idée fixe et toujours présents les uns aux autres. L’homme s’y donne enfin à lui-même la forme et la limite apaisante qu’il poursuit en vain dans sa condition. Le roman fabrique du destin sur mesure. C’est ainsi qu’il concurrence la création et qu’il triomphe, provisoirement, de la mort.”

“Eventually, however, the denial turned into emptiness and my childhood ended.”

“Qui cache son fou, meurt sans voix”

“If one does die taking these drugs, the death is likely to be very peaceful. Morphia is, after all, the goddess of dreams.”

“With The Dread, first kiss was the beginning. Second kiss was the end.”

“Be gentle,always delicatewith every soulyou meet,for every single morningyou wake up,there is someoneWishing,silentlyand secretly,that theyhad not.”

“One forgets the dead quite quickly; one doesn’t wonder about the dead-what is he doing now, who is he with?”

“In the last moment of his life, he turned his fading “flame of life” into a huge fire that enveloped the world. I’ve never laughed more than on that day…!! I’ve never cried more than on that day… I’ve never drank more either..!! He was our captain… and he was a magnificent man…!!!”

“Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.”

“All his life the example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter’s logic – “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal” – had seemed to him to be true only in relation to Caius the man, man in general, and it was quite justified , but he wasn’t Caius and he wasn’t man in general, and he had always been something quite, quite special apart from all other beings; he was Vanya, with Mama, with Papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with his toys and the coachman, with Nyanya, then with Katenka, with all the joys, sorrows, passions of childhood, boyhood, youth. Did Caius know the smell of the striped leather ball Vanya loved so much?: Did Caius kiss his mother’s hand like that and did the silken folds of Caius’s mother’s dress rustle like that for him? Was Caius in love like that? Could Caius chair a session like that? And Caius is indeed mortal and it’s right that he should die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my feelings and thoughts – for me it’s quite different. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too horrible.”

“Death was for-the other people.”

“The beauty of the sea is that it never shows any weakness and never tires of the countless souls that unleash their broken voices into its secret depths.”

“I didn’t cry when they buried my father – I wouldn’t let myself. I didn’t cry when they buried my sister. On Thursday night, with my family asleep upstairs, my eyes filled as Agassi and Marcos Baghdatis played out the fifth set of their moving second-round match.”

“Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.”

“I have lived in this tree, in this same hollow,” the owl said, “for more years than anyone can remember. But now, when the wind blows hard in winter and rocks the forest, I sit here in the dark, and from deep down in the bole, near the roots, I hear a new sound. It is the sound of strands of wood creaking in the cold and snapping one by one. The limbs are falling; the tree is old, and it is dying. Yet I cannot bring myself, after so many years, to leave, to find a new home and move into it, perhaps to fight for it. I, too, have grown old. One of these days, one of these years, the tree will fall, and when it does, if I am still alive, I will fall with it.”