I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
What the trees can do handsomely-greening and flowering, fading and then the falling of leaves-human beings cannot do with dignity, let alone without pain.
I do not hope for a world at peace, all of it, all the time. I do not believe in the perfectibility of man, which is what would be required for world peace; I only believe in the human race. I believe the human race must continue.
On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.
I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.
The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.
I took only one suitcase, and a cosmetics case for medicines but I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without.
… none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something that I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and were blind.
Our hearts are light and gay because now its happening, we’re starting, we’re travelling again.
I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same.
Politics really must be a rotten profession considering what awful moral cowards most politicians become as soon as they get the job.
Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn’t know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn’t see how I could write it.
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.