Character: Tom Degala

This is one of the wonders of life. Being on pins and needles myself, I nevertheless possessed a strange ability to calm people down.

When I surrounded myself with books and immersed myself in a creative environment, my soul became lighter. I physically felt all my anxieties subside.

I don't know who said that people are worthy of the fate that they are able to endure, but this is not true. Most often, fate acts as a kind of purging, vicious beast, who is happy to break the lives of the weakest, while countless brainless scum live happily ever after.

In my distant youth, only thanks to books I realized that I would never be alone.

I thought of Vinka as she should have been, in my opinion, and did not notice the one she really was. I endowed her with qualities that only existed in my imagination. And he could not even admit that he was deeply mistaken.

Death is no ordinary adversary. She always wins in the end.

No girl is worth my dropping out of school because of her.

Passion has nothing to do with love.

You can truly know life only by stuffing cones.

Like most lovers who experience first love, I thought I would never be able to experience such a deep feeling for anyone.

We literally read each other's thoughts, and our mutual understanding invariably amazed me. Vinka has become for me a kindred soul, which I have been waiting for since I reached the age when you start waiting for someone.

The fast pace of time didn't scare me at all. I did not become discouraged when I celebrated my fortieth birthday and when my temples turned white. To be honest, I was even impatient to grow old, because it meant moving away from the past, which had nothing to do with Paradise Lost, but seemed to me the epicenter of the drama from which I had been running away all my life.

By nature, I am a loner who used to carry a book in his pocket, but never bothered to get a Facebook account. A kind of recluse, not very adapted to the era of the proponents of the like button.

Any novel - like any movie and any theatrical play - is often the fruit of many years of hard work, doubt and rethinking.