The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

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Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

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And the rest is rust and stardust.

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We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

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A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.

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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.

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I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

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Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

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