Lermontov became a soldier, escaping from her grandmother and her troublesome love. He exchanged the pen, which is the key to one’s soul, for a pistol, which is the key to the gates of the world.
The situation is very slightly solemn and thus embarrassing, as are all such situations when after the initial lovemaking, the lovers confront a future they are suddenly required to take on.
Some ideas have the force of a bomb exploding.
And I felt fear. Fear of that bleak horizon, fear of that destiny. I felt my soul shriveling, I felt it retreating, and I was frightened by the thought that it could not escape its encirclement.
They were happy not in spite of their sadness but thanks to it.
Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while as a mistake.
No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live.
Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.
She came from a land where revolutionary illusion had long since faded but where the thing he admired most in revolution remained: life on a large scale; a life of risk, daring, and the danger of death. Sabina had renewed his faith in the grandeur of human endeavour. Superimposing the painful drama of her country on her person, he found her even more beautiful.
She now knew there were conditions under which she could feel strong and fulfilled, and she longed to go off into the world and seek those conditions somewhere else.
I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.
Love is a battle?” said Franz. “Well, I don’t feel at all like fighting.” And he left.
Laughter was like an enormous trap waiting patiently in the room with them; but hidden behind a thin wall.
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone.
The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
It would be so simple to find peace in the world of fantasy. But I’ve always tried to live in the two worlds at the same time without giving up one for the other. I must not give up the real world even though I am losing everything in it. Perhaps it will be enough in the end if I manage one thing. One last thing: To hand over my life as a clear message to the one person able to understand it and carry it on.
Atunci am inteles semnificatia magica a cercului. Cand iesi din rand mai poti reveni. Randul este o formatiune deschisa. Cercul insa se inchide, si-l parasesti fara posibilitatea intoarcerii.
When music plays, we hear the melody, forgetting that it is only one of the modes of time; when the orchestra falls silent, we hear time; time itself.
Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.
In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.