Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.
Speak of the devil, and the devil shall appear.
My life was an unending, unchanging midnight. It must, by necessity, always be midnight for me. So how was it possible that the sun was rising now, in the middle of my midnight?
I, the soul called Wanderer, love you, human Ian. And that will never change, no matter what I might become.
Books have been thought of as windows to another world of imagination
It's not the face, but the expressions on it. It's not the voice, but what you say. It's not how you look in that body, but the thing you do with it. You are beautiful.
You are. . . Well, not exactly the love of my life, because I expect to love you for much longer than that. The love of my existence. " -Bella
You see, I get so much fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.
I was one of those people raised by a woman who was what I call a prisoner of war. She was captured, she didn't want to be there, she was unhappy, she was banging away in the kitchen, the way that a prisoner would bang on her jail cell, you know, really unhappy. She had to cook for nine people with really little money, so she really just got burned out. So I didn't know that you could actually cook and it would be calming, pleasurable.
An unselfish dream, goal, or service can help us to the height of spiritual living.
I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment. . . I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.