If you want peace, understand war.
How thick the fog is. I can't see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It's getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness.
A game of secret, cunning stratagems, in which only the fools who are fated to lose reveal their true aims or motives - even to themselves.
Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.
You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.
When men make gods, there is no God!
Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.
Storytelling is an act of cruelty. We are cruel to our characters because to be kind is to invite boredom, and boredom in storytelling is synonymous with big doomy death-shaped death. So: be cruel to your protagonist. Rob him of something. Something important. Something he needs. A weapon. An asset. A piece of knowledge. A loved one. A DELICIOUS PIE. Take it away! Force him to operate without it. Conflict reinvigorates stale stories. New conflict, or old conflict that has evolved and grown teeth.
I never thought Greek philosophy could make a damn bit of sense to me. And most of it didn't, but those words just seemed right. 'Love is composed of a single soul, inhabiting two bodies. '" He took her by the shoulders drawing her close. "It rang true for me, in a way nothing else did. Whatever soul I had, Katie, I think I placed it in your keeping twenty years ago. And now, it's as if. . . every time we kiss, you give a little piece of it back.
The very greatest genius, after all, is not the greatest thing in the world, any more than the greatest city in the world is the country or the sky. It is the concentration of some of its greatest powers, but it is not the greatest diffusion of its might. It is not the habit of its success, the stability of its sereneness.
Ivan tells Anna: "I used to imagine that being embraced by a woman. . . as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everthing. . . [But] happiness, it turns out, will be to share with you the burden I can't share with anyone else.