Aestylis

“Where the legs have gone the hind legs must follow”
― Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murád

“If you prefer,
I'll be pure raging meat,
or if you prefer,
as the sky changes tone,
I'll be absolutely tender,
not a man, but a cloud in trousers!”
― Vladimir Mayakovsky

“My age, my beast, who can
Gaze into your pupils
And with his blood cement
The vertebrae of two centuries?”
― Osip Mandelstam

“In winter he visited his other villages or spent his time reading. The books he read were chiefly historical, and on these he spent a certain sum every year. He was collecting, as he said, a serious library, and he made it a rule to read through all the books he bought. He would sit in his study with a grave air, reading—a task he first imposed upon himself as a duty, but which afterwards became a habit affording him a special kind of pleasure and a consciousness of being occupied with serious matters.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace