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“We lived in the country, I went to school, and - an important detail - I slept in my parents' room. At night it was my father's habit to read aloud to my mother. Though he was a Greek Orthodox priest, he would read anything, doubtless assuming that at my age I wouldn't understand. Usually I didn't even listen and fell asleep, unless the text was some gripping story. One night I pricked up my ears. He was reading the scene from a biography of Rasputin where the father, on his deathbed, calls his son to him and says: 'Go to Saint Petersburg and make yourself master of the city, fear nothing and no one, for God is an old hog.' Such an enormity in my father's mouth, for whom the priesthood was not a joke, impressed me as much as a conflagration or an earthquake. But I also distinctly recall - this was over fifty years ago - that my emotion was followed by a strange, dare I say a perverse pleasure.”

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Book:The Trouble with Being Born
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“Some people maintain that the fear of death does not have a deeper justification, because as long as there is an I there is no death, and once dead there is no I any longer. These people have forgotten about the very strange phenomenon of gradual agony. What comfort does this artificial distinction between the I and death offer a man who has a strong premonition of death? What meaning can logical argument or subtle thought have for someone deeply imbued with a feeling of the irrevocable? All attempts to bring existential questions onto a logical plane are null and void. Philosophers are too proud to confess their fear of death and too supercilious to acknowledge the spiritual fecundity of illness. Their reflections on death exhibit a hypocritical serenity; in fact, they tremble with fear more than anyone else. One should not forget that philosophy is the art of masking inner torments.”

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Book:On the Heights of Despair
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“No mental state is less creative than mild sadness, the very negation of inspiration. Everything depends on the level of sadness, on the frequency of its vibrations. At a certain level it is poetical, at another musical, and finally religious. Thus there are different kinds of sadness: of poets, of musicians, of saints. The sadness of poets or musicians leaves their heart, goes around the world, and returns like an echo. The sadness of saints also leaves the heart but it stops in God, thus fulfilling every saint's secret wish, to become his prisoner.”

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Book:Tears and Saints
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“The empire of the sky occupies territory emptied of vitality. Heavenly imperialism aims at biological neutrality. How does music suck our blood? Man cannot live without support in space. But music annihilates space completely. The only art capable of bringing comfort, yet it opens up more wounds than all the others! Music is the sound track of askesis. Could one make love after Bach? Not even after Handel, whose unearthliness does not have a heavenly perfume. Music is a tomb of delights, beatitude which buries us. Saintliness also draws blood. We lose it in direct proportion to our longing for heaven. The roads to heaven have been worn smooth by all the erring instincts. Indeed, heaven was born of these errors.”

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Book:Tears and Saints
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“Healthy, normal people cannot experience either agony or death. They live as if life had a definitive character. It is an integral part of normal people's superficial equilibrium to take life as absolutely independent from death and to objectify death as a reality transcending life. That's why they perceive death as coming from the outside, not as an inner fatality of life itself. One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death's prisoner. Metaphysical revelations begin only when one's superficial equilibrium starts to totter and a painful struggle is substituted for naive spontaneity. The premonition of death is so rare in average people that one can can practically say that it does not exist. The fact that the presentiment of death appears only when life is shaken to its foundations proves beyond doubt the immanence of death in life. An insight into these depths shows us how illusory is the belief in life's integrity and how well founded the belief in a metaphysical substratum of demonism.”

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Book:On the Heights of Despair
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“I do not interrupt him, I let him weigh each man's merits, waiting for him to tell me off.... His incomprehension of others is astounding. Subtle and ingenuous both, he judges you as if you were an entity or a category. Time having had no hold over him, he cannot admit that I am outside of whatever he forbids, that nothing of what he favors still concerns me. Dialogue becomes pointless with someone who escapes the procession of the years. I ask those I love to be kind enough to grow old.”

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Book:The Trouble with Being Born
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