Destiny is a stubborn maiden. She likes herself just the way she is.

Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa.

I desire to know you. Every breath of your heart, every fleeting look on your face, the rhythm of your joys, and the melancholy of your sorrows.

Something flickered in the distance, dressing the darkness in a soft veil of blue. Out of the blue came an explosion of sounds followed by the seamlessly expressed melancholy of Chopin’s “Ballade no. 1.

The external evils are nothing compared to the evils that we harbor in our souls.

Once upon a time, when the evil spirit of darkness reigned over the Land of Azerbaijan, hiding the sun inside his underground caves,When the orphan sky peered at the Caucasus Mountains from the black dome of sorrow,When the rain shed its tears of ice upon the barren earth…

Evil tempts every soul, but a weak soul tempts evil.

My eyes still swelled with tears, but my heart was dancing the lazgi.

Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy.

Music is not in the notes but in what is between them.

My fingers traced the melody on an invisible keyboard—my usual way to connect with the music, to feel its emotions on my fingertips. I touched the keys softly, as if gliding my hands through water, but the musical notes kept slipping between my fingers like bubbles, waltzing away in the blue radiance.

The hurt is the place where the music enters you.

How easy to be free. How strong we are when we have nothing to lose.

By the time I turned fifteen, Communism had become my religion.

A knife wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.