Gabriel García Márquez
If I knew that today would be the last time I'd see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I'd embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I'd take hold of each word. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I'd tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
- Reshaping life
People who can say that have never understood a thing about life - they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat - however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
- About dreams
It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it's just the contrary. Often it's something you paid no attention to at the time - words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed - these are the things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking hours.
