Bulgakov’s gentle irony is a warning against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical.
A morphine addict has one piece of good fortune, which nobody can take away from him – the capacity to spend his life in total solitude. And solitude means important, significant ideas, it means contemplation, tranquillity, wisdom...
I must give due praise to the man who first extracted morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped seven minutes after the injection. Interesting: the pain passed over me in ceaseless waves, so that I had to gasp for breath, as though a red-hot crowbar were being thrust into my stomach and rotated. Four minutes after the injection I was able to distinguish the wave-like nature of the pain.
Do you know with whom you are presently speaking?’ Woland asked the visitor. Whose guest are you? ‘I do,’ replied the master, ‘my neighbour in the madhouse was that boy, Ivan Homeless. He told me about you.’ ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ Woland responded, ‘I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch’s Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don’t exist. But you do believe that it is really I?
What you say is true,’ the master observed, struck by the neatness of Koroviev’s work, ’that if there are no papers, there’s no person. I have no papers, so there’s precisely no me.
Soon the room had that desolate look that comes from the chaos of packing up to go away and, worse, from removing the shade from the lamp. Never, never take the shade off a lamp. A lampshade is something sacred. Scuttle away like a rat from danger and into the unknown. Read or doze beside your lampshade; let the storm howl outside and wait until they come for you.
He’s clever,” thought Ivan. “You have to admit, there are some smart people even among the intelligentsia. No denying that!
But I judge by the eyes – you can’t mistake them either near or far! Oh, eyes are a significant thing! Like a barometer. You can see everything – who has a vast desert in his heart, who can jab you in the ribs with the toe of his boot for no reason at all, and who is afraid of everything.
It is interesting to note that Margarita’s soul was in perfect shape.
Oh, thrice romantic Master, don’t you want to stroll with your beloved by day under the cherries bursting into bloom, and int he evenings listen to Schubert’s music? Won’t it be pleasant for you to write with a quill by candlelight? Don’t you want to sit, like Faust, over a retort, hoping to create a new homunculus?
L’amour surgit devant nous comme surgit de terre l’assassin au coin d’une ruelle obscure, et nous frappa tous deux d’un coup. Ainsi frappe la foudre, ainsi frappe le poignard !
El hombre es mortal, y, como acertadamente se dijo, es mortal de repente.
Make the wall 2.
Aren’t there enough plays already? There are such lovely plays and so many of them. If you were to start playing them you couldn’t get through them all in twenty years. Why do you want to write? It must be so upsetting!
I can’t escape from here. Not because it’s too high but because I’ve nowhere to go.
No, you mustn’t give way. It’s simply that you don’t know what the theater’s like. There are some complicated mechanisms in this world but the theater is the most complicated of them all...
The evil is in humans, the Devil is not to blame.
So what if I had to eat out of dustbins? At least it was an honest living.
No. Never, not even when falling asleep, will I ever proudly mutter about nothing being able to surprise me. No. As one year has passed, so will another, and it will be just as rich in surprises as the first one... And so I have to go on dutifully learning.
During abstinence, I’m frightened of rustling noises, people are hateful to me. I’m afraid of them. During the euphoria I love them all, but I prefer solitude.
Why, when all’s said and done, do I have to think up a pretext for my every action? I mean, it really is torment, not a life!