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“You come to torture me, yes, to make me say things, but I shall say nothing. You will tear off my fingernails, and put lighted matches on my skin and worse than that. But I will not speak.”

“What do you think is going to happen?"
"Death. Delicious death."

“Must the tragic man in that culture, trained through his self-education for seriousness and terror, not inevitably yearn for a new art of metaphysical consolation; Tragedy?”

“That eye that had never glowed with the sweet madness of artistic inspiration - turned upon tragedy. Let us imagine that this eye had failed to gaze with pleasure into the abysses of the Dionysiac - what would it see in what Plato called the 'divine and praiseworthy art of tragedy?”

“The chorus master was the object of untiring praise: indeed, there were some who would have killed themselves to learn more from him, had they not known that the tragic poet was just as dead as tragedy itself.”

“He saw the god, with whose suffering he had already identified, walking on to the stage. He involuntarily translated the entire image of the god that was trembling before his soul to that masked figure, and dissolved its reality into a ghostly unreality.”

“But in so far as the subject is an artist, he is already liberated from his individual will and has become a medium through which the only truly existent subject celebrates his redemption through illusion.”

“An ethical deity, demands moderation from his followers and, in order to maintain it, self-knowledge. And thus the admonitions 'Know thyself and "Nothing to excess!' coexist with the aesthetic necessity of beauty, while hubris and excess are considered the truly hostile spirits of the non-Apolline realm.”

“The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is a consummate artist, is the precondition of all visual art, and indeed, as we shall see, of an important amount of poetry.”

“I had always sensed hostility to life, a furious, vindictive distaste for life itself: for all life is
based on appearance, art, deception, point of view, the necessity of perspective and error.”

"She had a look of suffering and I was struck less by her beauty than by the extraordinary
loneliness in her eyes."

“I have no more dreams, or inspiration either.” replied the master. “No one around me interests me, except her.” He again put his hand on Margarita's head. “I'm broken.”

“Poor Ivan had tried to convince that the devil does not exist. It was this non-existent one who was sitting on the bed. Two eyes were fixed on Margarita's face. The right one with a golden spark at its bottom, drilling anyone to the bottom of his soul, and the left one empty and black, like the narrow eye of a needle, like the entrance to the bottomless well of all darkness and shadow.”

“She did not know who it was she loved: a living man or a dead one. And the longer the desperate days went on, the more often, especially at twilight, did the thought come to her that she was bound to a dead man. She had either to forget him or to die herself. It was impossible to drag on with such a life. Forget him, whatever the cost, forget him. But he would not be forgotten, that was the trouble.”

“Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never. A sudden question is put to you, you don't even flinch, in one second you get hold of yourself and know what you must say to conceal the truth, and you speak quite convincingly, and not a wrinkle on your face moves, but the truth which the question stirs up from the bottom of your soul leaps momentarily into your eyes, and it's all over!”

“I cannot escape from here, not because it's high up, but because I have nowhere to escape to.”

“Nikanor Ivanovich was called out to the front hall of his apartment, plucked by the sleeve, whispered to, winked at, promised that he would not be left the loser. This torture went on.”

“Indeed, they lock up a healthy man in a clinic, and pretend that that is how it ought to be.”

“There’s no arguing with the mentally ill.”

“And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven.”

"Eternal damnation is the lot of mankind, neither tears, nor reparation, can undo Man's heritage of sin.”

"Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway."

"We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways."

"Hill House has an impressive list of tragedies connected with it, but then, most old houses have. People have to live and die somewhere, after all, and a house can hardly stand for eighty years without seeing some of its inhabitants die within its walls.”

“Don't do it.” Eleanor told the little girl. “Insist on your cup of stars, once they have trapped you into being like everyone else, you will never see your cup of stars again.”

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”

I KNEW IT I KNEW IT WAS THIS PERSON

“You really can't do that. It isn't playing the game."
"I am not playing a game, I am hunting down a murderer."