“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...”

“When I was 14 or 15, our teacher introduced us to Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities.' It was just for entertainment - we read it aloud - and all of a sudden it became a treasure.”

“Happiness is your own treasure because it lies within you.”

“Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.”

“The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the ef...”

“Of what use can our labour be, when the labours we record are in themselves entirely useless?”

“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”