Cam Burne

“Taras Bulba:
I brought you into this world and I can take you out.

Taras:
My son, why? Why?

Andrei Bulba:
I did what I had to do.

Taras:
From the day I plunged you in the river to give you life, I loved you as I loved the steppes. You were my pride! I gave you life. It is on me to take it away from you.

Taras:
Put your faith in your sword and your sword in the Pole.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba

“Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time — so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again