Christians

"I feel asleep late last night Crying like a newborn child Holding myself close Pretending my arms are yours I want no one but you."

"My love for you is unconditional love too Gotta get up, get out, get up, get out, get up And show you that it"

"I don't know if I've ever felt like this before But I'm sure that the way I feel, I don't want it to go 'Cuz I've cried my share of tears And I've sang my share of blues But to keep you over here, I'll do what I got to do"

"Relax... it's just sex."

"So here's my demonstration A peep show Tonight my body's an exhibition baby Though it's on display don't be scared to Touch It, It said so So come and get it babe"

"Acceptance is right. Kindness is right. Love is right. I pray, right now, that we're moving into a kinder time when prejudice is overcome by understanding; when narrow-mindedness, and narrow-minded bigotry is overwhelmed by open-hearted empathy; when the pain of judgmentalism is replaced by the purity of love."

"It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art."

"Pater is a neglected author to-day. One can understand why. His mind is a little languid, his style a little mannered, and himself a little over-serious. There is something ludicrous in expounding the art of enjoyment in so hushed and solemn a tone. All the same, it is a great pity to neglect Pater. To a degree unparalleled among English writers, he combined the two qualities essential for critical appreciation—common sense and uncommon sensibility."

"We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life."

"To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people."

"A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value."

"Rousseau … asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement."

"Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass."

"What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions."

"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."

"The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea."

"Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced."

"Russia! Russia! I see you now, from my wondrous, beautiful past I behold you! How wretched, dispersed, and uncomfortable everything is about you..."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers...Many Russian novelists influenced me as well: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Gogol, and Bulgarov."

"Homeland, tenderer than first caresses,/you have taught me to protect and guard/golden language in all Pushkin's treasures,/Gogol's magic, captivating word."

"Russia, are you not speeding along like a fiery and matchless troika?"

"However, nothing turned out as Tchitchikoff had intended."

"Among a number of intelligent suggestions there was finally this one too, strange as it may seem, that Chichikov might be Napoleon in disguise..."

"Apparently that does sometimes happen. Apparently even men like Chichikov are transformed into poets for a few moments in their lives: though the word "poet" would be an exaggeration here."

"They insist that an author should write in the strictest, purest and noblest language: in short, they expect the Russian language to drop from the clouds, already refined, and that it should come naturally to the lips, so that all they have to do is to open their mouth and stick out their tongue. It goes without saying, of course, that the feminine half of the human species is very wise; but it must be confessed that our respected readers are even wiser."

"The reason why Proshka wore such large boots can be explained at once: Plyushkin kept only one pair of boots for all of his servants, however numerous they were, and they always stood in the hall."

"there is no word so perk and quick, which bursts from the heart with such spontaneity, which seethes and bubbles with such vitality, as the aptly spoken Russian word"

"Why are you being so stingy?", Sobakevich demanded. "It's cheap at the price. A rogue would cheat you, sell you some worthless rubbish instead of souls, but mine are as juicy as ripe nuts, all picked—they are all either craftsmen or sturdy peasants."

"Rus! Rus! I see you, from my lovely enchanted remoteness I see you: a country of dinginess, and bleakness and dispersal; no arrogant wonders of nature crowned by the arrogant wonders of art appear within you to delight or terrify the eyes... So what is the incomprehensible secret force driving me towards you? Why do I constantly hear the echo of your mournful song as it is carried from the sea through your entire expanse?... And since you are without end yourself, is it not within you that a boundless thought will be born?"

"Oh troika, winged troika, tell me who invented you? Surely, nowhere but among a nimble nation could you have been born in a country which has taken itself in earnest and has evenly spread far and wide over half of the globe, so that once you start counting the milestones you may count on till a speckled haze dances before your eyes... Rus, are you not similar in your headlong motion to one of those nimble troikas that none can overtake? The flying road turns into smoke under you, bridges thunder and pass, all fall back and is left behind!... And what does this awesome motion mean? What is the passing strange steeds! Has the whirlwind a home in your manes?... Rus, whither are you speeding to? Answer me. No answer. The middle bell trills out in a dream its liquid soliloquy; the roaring air is torn to pieces and becomes wind; all things on earth fly by and other nations and states gaze askance as they step aside and give her the right of way."

"And for a long time yet, led by some wondrous power, I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone."

"There are people who exist in this world not like entities but like the speckles or spots on something."

"As it is so strangely ordained in this world, what is amusing will turn into being gloomy, if you stand too long before it, and then God knows what ideas may not stray into the mind... Why is it that even in moments of unthinking, careless gaiety a different and strange mood comes upon one?"

"[Women's] boarding schools, as we know, hold the three principal subjects which constitute the basis of human virtue to be the French language (a thing indispensable to the happiness of married life), piano-playing (a thing wherewith to beguile a husband’s leisure moments), and that particular department of housewifery which is comprised in the knitting of purses and other “surprises.” Nevertheless changes and improvements have begun to take place, since things now are governed more by the personal inclinations and idiosyncracies of the keepers of such establishments. For instance, in some seminaries the regimen places piano-playing first, and the French language second, and then the above department of housewifery; while in other seminaries the knitting of “surprises” heads the list, and then the French language, and then the playing of pianos—so diverse are the systems in force!"

"The gentleman lolling back in the chaise was neither dashingly handsome nor yet unbearably ugly, neither too stout nor yet too thin; it could not be claimed he was old but he was no stripling, either. His arrival in the town created no stir and was not marked by anything out of the ordinary."

"What a dreary world we live in, gentlemen."

"What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves!"

"The sergeant's widow told you a lie when she said I flogged her. I never flogged her. She flogged herself."

"I tell everyone very plainly that I take bribes, but what kind of bribes? Why, greyhound puppies. That's a totally different matter."

"The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities."

"Of course, Alexander the Great was a hero, but why smash the chairs?"

"It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry."

"[Final lines] mother, mother, save your unhappy son! Let a tear fall on his aching head! See how they torture him! Press the poor orphan to your bosom! He has no rest in this world; they hunt him from place to place. Mother, mother, have pity on your sick child! And do you know that the Bey of Algiers has a wart under his nose?"

"All the world knows that France sneezes when England takes a pinch of snuff."

"To tell the truth, I often felt uneasy when I thought of the excessive brittleness and fragility of the moon. The moon is generally repaired in Hamburg, and very imperfectly. It is done by a lame cooper, an obvious blockhead who has no idea how to do it. He took waxed thread and olive-oil—hence that pungent smell over all the earth which compels people to hold their noses. And this makes the moon so fragile that no men can live on it, but only noses. Therefore we cannot see our noses, because they are on the moon."

"[P]eople think that the human brain is in the head. Nothing of the sort; it is carried by the wind from the Caspian Sea."

"No date. The day had no date."

"Marchember 86. Between day and night."

"The year 2000: April 43rd.—To-day is a day of splendid triumph. Spain has a king; he has been found, and I am he."

"Dogs are clever fellows; they know all about politics [...]"