Daria

“Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“You are well off, you are alone, Hasse had said. All very well—the man who is alone cannot be forsaken. But sometimes, at night, the whole artificial structure collapses, life turns into a sobbing insistent melody; out of the senseless grinding of the everlasting barrel organ, rises up a whirlwind of wild desires, cravings, melancholy, hope, without direction seeking an object. Ach, this pitiful need for a little bit of warmth—couldn’t it be two hands then and a face bowed near? Or was that too only deception, surrender, and flight? Was there nothing then, but to be alone? I shut the window. No, there was nothing. For anything more, there was too little solid ground under one’s feet.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov