经历了不解、震惊、愤怒、崇敬、向往、心痛、释然，看完了这本书。写不出书评，就摘抄几段吧，还有许多留在书里。

"I tell you I've got to paint. I can't help myself. When a man falls into the water it doesn't matter how he swims, well or badly: he's got to get out or else he'll drown."

"There was ... in his soul some deep-rooted instince of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action."

这是不得不做，像溺水般无助，像癌症生长

"Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination."

走过同样的路才能理解我

"Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realize that his love will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality. It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego."

爱让人面目全非

"People talk of beauty lightly, and having no feeling for words, they use that one carelessly, so that it loses its force; and the thing it stands for, sharing its name with a hundred trivial objects, is deprived of dignity. They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognize it."

"But Stroeve ... had a love and an understanding of beauty which were as honest and sincere as was his own sincere and honest soul."

美应是崇高的、纯洁的

"We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them."

踽踽独行

"Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife?"

如何才算浪费生命，如何才算成功呢？