Marina

“The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The Christian, when he had calmed down sufficiently, admitted that the riddle was good. “I have created something cleverer than myself," he cried.'
Here Yoll interrupted himself. 'I do not understand his astonishment, for who has not heard of a storyteller who is stupider than the story he invents?”
― Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare

“Разделять народы, чтобы над ними властвовать, — это метод XIX века. В современном мире он обречен на неуспех. Иллюзия — думать, что империю могут скрепить ложь и неграмотность.”
― Ольга Алленова, Форпост. Беслан и его заложники

“...there is something Russian about this particular use of the eye as an aggressive and defensive weapon. In Russian literature there is endless variation in the use of the eye as a soulful receptor, as an avid grasper, and as the very organ for mutual soulful surrender. In regard to the great models of political and literary life, however, the emphasis is on the eye as an incorruptible instrument for the manipulation of the future. Gorky's description of Tolstoy is typical: 'With sharp eyes, from which neither a single pebble nor a single thought could hide itself, he looked, measured, tested, compared.' Or again, his eyes are 'screwed up as though straining to look into the future'.
Equally typical is Trotsky's description of Lenin:
When Lenin, his left eye narrowed, receives a wireless containing a speech he resembles a devilishly clever peasant who does not let himself be confused by any words, or deluded by any phrases. That is highly intensified peasant shrewdness, lifted to the point of inspiration.”
― Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society