How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich? By staying hungry? But us, you know, we’re alive!
We are speaking different languages, as always, but that doesn’t change the things we talk about.
Unfortunately, I cannot do that,’ replied the master, ‘because I burned it in the stove.’ ‘Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,’ Woland replied, ’that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.
But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the novel as a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol, of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius.
I don’t like the news on the radio. It’s always read by girls of some sort who pronounce the place names incomprehensibly. What’s more, one in three of them has a slight speech defect, as though such ones are selected deliberately.
The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna’s long-time and devoted housekeeper, to say, in case he received any telephone calls, that he would be back in ten minutes, and left together with the proper, white-gloved policeman. He not only did not come back in ten minutes, but never came back at all.
Some totalitarians prefer to conceal themselves behind the machinery of the state, but, like the cannibal who lovingly cradles his victim as he digs around for his heart, Stalin liked conversing with his terrorized children. He was an intimate murderer.
She had a look of suffering and I was struck less by her beauty than by the extraordinary loneliness in her eyes.
It happens that way when a man strives to become the centre of attention, to bring sensational news somewhere.
The poet had wasted his night while others had spent it enjoying themselves and now he realised that it was lost forever. He only had to lift his head up from the lamp and look at the sky to see that the night had gone beyond return. Waiters were hurriedly jerking the cloths off the tables. The cats pacing the verandah had a morning look about them. Day broke inexorably over the poet.
I was helping the firemen, Messire,” replied Korovyev, indicating his ripped trousers. “Ah, if that’s the case, then of course, a new building will have to be built.
What am I crying for, when I’ve got some wine?
Very well then,” replied the guest, and said weightily and distinctly: “Yesterday at Patriarch’s Ponds you met with Satan.
There’s no need for you to intercede for him, Margarita, because the one with whom he so sought to talk has already interceded for him.
These sorrowful musings on my imperfection were nothing compared to the awful realization that I had gained precisely nothing from reading the books of the very best writers; no avenues had opened up, no light gleamed ahead and it had done nothing but depress me. Wormlike, the awful thought began to gnaw at my heart that I should never make a writer.
Allow me to ask you, then, how man can govern if he cannot plan for even so ridiculously short a span as a thousand years or so, if, in fact, he cannot guarantee his own next day?
Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?
I have just been cut in half by a streetcar at Patriarch’s. Funeral Friday 3PM. Come. Berlioz.
The movies are a woman’s only solace in life.
And to the revenge – on the hacks, the yes-men, the snitches, the hypocrites – that the novel declines to rise above.