The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

The poet had wasted his night while others had spent it enjoying themselves and now he realised that it was lost forever.

‘Thank you, but I never eat when I’m drinking,’

‘Because as soon as you appear at a police station dressed in your underpants and say you’ve met a man who knew Pontius Pilate, you’ll immediately be brought back here and put in this room again.’ ‘Because of my underpants?’ asked Ivan, staring distractedly about him. ‘Chiefly because of Pontius Pilate. But the underpants will help.

‘Love leaped up out at us like a murderer jumping out of a dark alley. It shocked us both – the shock of a stroke of lightning, the shock of a flick-knife. Later she said that this wasn’t so, that we had of course been in love for years without knowing each other and never meeting, that she had merely been living with another man and I had been living with … that girl, what was her name …?’

Go home now and may the hell which your wife is preparing for you be your punishment.’

We all know how hard it is to acquire money – the process is strewn with obstacles; but in his thirty years’ experience Vassily Stepanovich had never yet found anyone who had made the least objection to taking money when offered it.

Intelligent people, however, become intelligent by solving complicated problems.

She had a passion for people who did things well.

‘Dear lady …’ Koroviev began tenderly. ‘I’m not a dear lady,’ interrupted the woman. ‘Oh, what a shame,’ said Koroviev in a disappointed voice and went on: ‘Well, if you don’t want to be a dear lady, which would have been delightful, you have every right not to be.

‘You’re not Dostoyevsky,’ said the woman to Koroviev. ‘How do you know?’ ‘Dostoyevsky’s dead,’ said the woman, though not very confidently. ‘I protest!’ exclaimed Behemoth warmly. ‘Dostoyevsky is immortal!’

he had a premonition that some more nonsense might be on the way.

You shall go to sleep with your dirty old cap on, you shall go to sleep with a smile on your lips. Sleep will give you strength and make you wise.