Text is like a musical score. It is true that Anna Karenina commits suicide in the same sense that is true that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is in C minor (and not in F major, like the Sixth) and begins with G,G,G,E-flat.

There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

كان رجال العهود الغابرة وسيمي الطلعة طويلي القامة و الآن أصبحوا أطفالاً و أقزاماً وليس هذا إلا دليلاً من جملة أدلة أخرى كثيرة تشهد بتعاسة عالم يسير نحو الهرم

عندما يخطئ الراعي ينبغي إبعاده عن بقية الرعاة ، ولكن الويل إذا ما أخذت النعاج ترتاب في الرعاة

You cannot change the world with ideas. People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes; they follow what everyone else does and are no trouble to anyone; they're successful, make money, find good jobs, enter politics, receive honours; they become famous writers, academics, journalists. Can anyone who is so good at looking after their own interests really be stupid? I'm the stupid one, the one who wanted to go tilting at windmills.

Dios ha muerto, el arte dejó de existir, la historia ha llegado a su fin, y yo mismo no me siento del todo bien.

Hoy no salir en televisión es un signo de elegancia.

Dostoevsky was writing about losers. The main character of The Iliad, Hector, is a loser. It’s very boring to talk about winners. The real literature always talks about losers. Madame Bovary is a loser. Julien Sorel is a loser. I am doing only the same job. Losers are more fascinating. Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance