“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”

“You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.”

“With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...”

“But then why shouldn't he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living - perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscio...”

“If I'm out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.”

“Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew that. He could only sigh at himself, that he should be so undeveloped on that significant side of hi...”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me; it has only strengthened me.”

“Find your noble purpose and defeat any residue of fear.”

“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.”