Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
To fear love is to fear life, and those whose fear life are already three parts dead...
I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.
I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind.
MEDVIEDENKO Why do you always wear mourning? MASHA I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.
In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don’t feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger – a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...
Podtyagin considers whether to take offence or not – and decides to take offence.
Without solitude true happiness was impossible. The fallen angel was faithless to God probably only because he longed for solitude, which angles knew not.
Within a year Ivan Dmitritch was completely forgotten in the town, and his books, heaped up by his landlady in a sledge in the shed, were pulled to pieces by boys.
Faith is a capacity of the spirit. It is like talent: you have to be born with it.
THE Superintendent said to me: “I only keep you out of regard for your worthy father; but for that you would have been sent flying long ago.” I replied to him: “You flatter me too much, your Excellency, in assuming that I am capable of flying.