Laukku

“Mutta paadutin sydämeni kuulemasta näitä ääniä, sillä rakastin häntä, vaikka hän oli hullu, ja kenties rakastin häntä juuri hänen hulluutensa tähden, sillä hänen hulluutensa oli kauniimpi kuin muiden ihmisten viisaus.”
― Mika Waltari, سینوهه

“Today I saw you and spoke to you for the first time.
It was like an earthquake; everything in me was overturned, the graves of my heart were opened and my own nature was strange to me.
I am forty, and I believed I had reached the autumn of life.
I had wandered far, known much and lived many lives. The Lord had spoken to me, manifesting Himself in many ways; to me angels had revealed themselves and I had not believed them. But when I saw you I was compelled to believe, because of the miracle that happened to me.”
― Mika Waltari, The Dark Angel

“To me [Edgar Allan Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.”
― Mark Twain

“I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium . . . . Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author. . . . far from being the height of perfection, [King Lear] is a very bad, carelessly composed production, . . . can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness. . . . All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language . . . .”
― Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare