“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.”

“'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'”

“When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.”

“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”

“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them?”

“Mountain is mountain.”

“That summer lying in the long grass with my head propped up against the back of a saddle, with the zenith above me and the drop of distance below, I listened to the mountain silence until I could h...”

“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry...”

“I was born behind the Iron Curtain, and I remember heated discussions about large-scale terra-forming projects, such as reversing the direction of the river Ob or putting up large reflectors into s...”

“You cannot step into the same river twice.”