"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."
"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out."
"Even in Siberia there is happiness."
"All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still."
"Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something."
"These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs."