“There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!”

“We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it foreve...”

“When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth ...”

“Even in Siberia there is happiness.”

“Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.”

“To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life -- it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A m...”

“Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.”

“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.”

“I believe that more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.”

“They're going to get the death penalty. They'll be strung up and made to be laughed at out in the streets and made examples of!”

“It would take me a long time to understand how systems inflict pain and hardship in people's lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough.”

“In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an ...”

“I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: "Go down again - I dwell among the people.”

“We limit ourselves and God who wants to work through us”

“God can only work through those who have totally identified themselves with His will and purpose”