“With you, my life felt indeed like a fantastic adventure - despite our ordinary circumstances, your love imbued everything we did with secret riches.”

“It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.”

“The correct understanding of life, let me tell you, is love despite everything. Love despite everything, that is the aim and object of life. Love, you see, is the only thing that pays in the long run, even though it might seem a dead loss in the short run.”

“Meeting you for the first time felt like my search was over and you became a part of my life's journey despite being a stranger and time passed and you slowly became my destination.”

“Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it's not the amount of time we have, despite what I've just said. No it's not quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety.”

“I was proud of my work with Yakov Isaevich, and he of me. Despite our good relationship, however, I kept my “other” mathematical life – my work with Fuchs and Feigin and all of that – secret from him as I did from most other people. It was as though applied mathematics was my spouse, and pure mathematics was my secret lover.”

“I think my life has been wonderful. I have done what I felt like. I was given courage and I was given adventure and that has carried me along. And then also a sense of humor and a little bit of common sense. It has been a very rich life.”

“Being rich is an obstacle to loving. When you are rich, you want to continue to be rich, and so you end up devoting all your time, all your energy, in your daily life to stay rich.”

“Everything was an adventure, at night, when you were where you shouldn't be, even if it was somwhere you could go perfectly well in daylight, and it was then only ordinary.”

“In a fantastic world, the fantastic had become merely ordinary.”