Anna

“If you should attempt to maintain that film is an art in conversation with a cultured, intelligent American, he'll just plain stop talking to you.”
― Ilya Ilf, Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Ippolit Matveevich turned even redder, pulled out a tiny notebook, and wrote in a calligraphic hand:

25/4/1927 — rubles issued to Comrade Bender — 8.

Ostap took a look inside the little book.

'Oh-ho! If you've gone ahead and opened a personal account for me, then the least you could do is tally it right. Start up a debit column, start up a credit column. Don't forget to enter the sixty thousand rubles you owe me in the debits, and the vest can go in the credits. The balance is in my favor: 59,992 rubles.”
― Ilya Ilf, The Twelve Chairs

“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra