“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.”

“A knife wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.”

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

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

“The hurt is the place where the music enters you.”

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

“Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy.”

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

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

“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…”

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