Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 48

I gave him my best cryptic smile. He did not fall down to his feet, kiss my shoes, and promise me the world. I must be getting rusty.
Ilona Andrews
Just wait until he figures out I shut him out of his slut hut.
Ilona Andrews
It seems that the young woman made some indelicate suggestion of a threesome...When I got there, Miss Nash was standing by the hot tub in a small bikini, pointing the business end of a SIG-Sauer P-226 at her fella and concerned members of the hotel staff, while dunking the scantily clad female's head under the water and asking, "Who's diving for clams now, bitch?
Ilona Andrews
Help me, I can’t breathe, your ego is pushing all the air out of the room.
Ilona Andrews
Did he just rip out the engine?" I asked."Yes", Saiman said. "And now he is demolishing the Maserati with it."Ten seconds later Curran hurled the twisted wreck of black and orange that used to be the Maserati into the wall.The first melodic notes of an old song came from the computer. I glanced at Saiman.He shrugged. "It begged for a soundtrack.
Ilona Andrews
It's a reflex. Hear a bell, get food. See an undead, throw a knife. Same thing, really.
Ilona Andrews
I can't give you the white picket fence, and if I did, you'd set it on fire.
Ilona Andrews
His Majesty needs a can-I girl anyway. And I'm not it.""A can-I girl?" Andrea frowned. I leaned back. "'Can I fetch your food, Your Majesty? Can I tell you how strong and mighty you are, Your Majesty? Can I pick your fleas, Your Majesty? Can I kiss your ass, Your Majesty? Can I..." It dawned on me that Raphael was sitting very still. Frozen, like a statue, his gaze fixed on the point above my head. "He's standing behind me, isn't he?" Andrea nodded slowly."Technically it should be 'may I'," Curran said, his voice deeper than I remembered. "Since you're asking for permission." Why me? "To answer your question, yes, you may kiss my ass. Normally I prefer maintain my personal space, but you're a Friend of the Pack and your services have proven useful once or twice. I strive to accommodate the wishes of persons friendly to my people. My only question is, would kissing my ass be obeisance, grooming, or foreplay?
Ilona Andrews
Curran looked back at me. "Why is it you always attract creeps?""You tell me." Ha! Walked right into that one, yes, he did.
Ilona Andrews
The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.
Nikolai Gogol
In the end, you feel that your much-vaunted, inexhaustible fantasy is growing tired, debilitated, exhausted, because you're bound to grow out of your old ideals; they're smashed to splinters and turn to dust, and if you have no other life, you have no choice but to keep rebuilding your dreams from the splinters and dust. But the heart longs for something different! And it is vain to dig in the ashes of your old fancies, trying to find even a tiny spark to fan into a new flame that will warm the chilled heart and bring back to life everything that can send the blood rushing wildly through the body, fill the eyes with tears--everything that can delude you so well!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.
Leo Tolstoy
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.
Leo Tolstoy
Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.
Konstantin Stanislavski
Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.
Mikhail Bulgakov
Ask yourself these three questions, Tatiana Metanova, and you will know who you are. Ask: What do believe in? What do you hope for? What do you love?
Paullina Simons
Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
Leo Tolstoy
If you want to be happy, be.
Leo Tolstoy
Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.
Leon Trotsky
But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.
Vladimir Nabokov
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Vladimir Nabokov
The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which are awful! Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another; while fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun... One feels that this inexhaustible fancy is weary at last and worn out with continual exercise, because one is growing into manhood, outgrowing one's old ideals: they are being shattered into fragments, into dust; if there is no other life one must build one up from the fragments. And meanwhile the soul longs and craves for something else! And in vain the dreamer rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart by the rekindled fire, and to rouse up in it again all that was so sweet, that touched his heart, that set his blood boiling, drew tears from his eyes, and so luxuriously deceived him!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.
Anton Chekhov
And you know, there's less charm in life when you think about death--but it's more peaceful.
Leo Tolstoy
Life did not stop, and one had to live.
Leo Tolstoy
There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.
Leo Tolstoy
You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.
Leo Tolstoy
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
Vladimir Nabokov
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
Joseph Brodsky
you might want to decide fast. We live in a dangerous world. If you see a chance to be happy, you have to fight for it, so later you have no regrets.
Ilona Andrews
Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
Vladimir Nabokov
If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.
Leo Tolstoy
A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.
Leo Tolstoy
Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.
Vladimir Nabokov
Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
Vladimir Nabokov
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But how could you live and have no story to tell?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.
Leo Tolstoy
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.
Nikolai Gogol
In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Leo Tolstoy
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Leo Tolstoy
I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
Boris Pasternak
Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
Vladimir Nabokov
You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.
Boris Pasternak
He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it
Leo Tolstoy
Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it’s only faith that gives love its strength and its joy.
Sergei Lukyanenko
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.
Leo Tolstoy
Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I’d missed him so much, it almost hurt. It started the moment I left the Keep and nagged at me all day. Every day I had to fight with myself to keep from making up bullshit reasons to call the Keep so I could hear his voice. My only saving grace was that Curran wasn’t handling this whole mating thing any better. Yesterday he’d called me at the office claiming that he couldn’t find his socks. We talked for two hours.
Ilona Andrews
You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you you hate it because you are afraid of it you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.
Mikhail Bulgakov
I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her –after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred–I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever–for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)–and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again–and 'oh, no,' Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure–all would be shattered.
Vladimir Nabokov
I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.
Leo Tolstoy
Everything I know, I know because of love.
Leo Tolstoy