Thank you for the offer, Anna Sergeyevna, and for your flattering opinion of my conversational talents. But I find even now I’ve spent too long in a world alien to me. Flying fish can stay a while in the air but they soon have to flop down into the water. Let me splash back into my element.
Why is it that when one is enjoying, say, a piece of music, or a beautiful summer evening, or a conversation with a sympathetic companion, the occasion seems rather a hint at an infinite felicity existent elsewhere than a real felicity actually being experienced?
Those were Anna Sergeyevna’s words, and those were Bazarovs; both thought they spoke the truth. Did their words hold the truth, the whole truth? They didn’t know it themselves, much less does the author. But their conversation went as if they completely believed one another.
The man who has not seen such tears in the eyes of his beloved does not know the height of happiness to which, with mingled joy and gratitude and modesty, a woman can attain.
Both men felt uncomfortable. Each knew the other understood him. That kind of knowledge is agreeable for friends, and for enemies very disagreeable, especially when they can’t either have it out or separate.
In reality you felt at the same time that he could not be friends, nor be really intimate with anyone, and that he could not be so, not because in general he was independent of other people, but because his whole being was for a time turned inwards upon himself.
Nowhere does time pass as swiftly as in Russia, though they say that in prison it passes even more quickly.
I believe that the reason why Dimitri’s soul is so clear, is that he is entirely given up to his work, his ideal. What has he to trouble about? When any one has utterly... utterly... given himself up, he has little sorrow, he is not responsible for anything. It’ s not I want, but it wants.
But are those prayers of theirs, those tears, all fruitless? Is their love, their hallowed selfless love, not omnipotent? Oh Yes! however passionate, sinful and rebellious the heart hidden in the tomb, the flowers growing over it peep at us serenely with their innocent eyes; they speak to us not only of eternal peace, of the vast repose of ‘indifferent’ nature: they tell us, too, of everlasting reconciliation and of life which has no end.
In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: ‘The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stands more than any other man as the incarnation of a whole race,’ because ‘a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth.’ Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic world, to which it was ’an honour to have been expressed by so great a Master.
In his heart he was highly delighted with his friend’s suggestion, but he thought it a duty to conceal his feeling. He was not a nihilist for nothing!
That impenetrable darkness exudes iron chill, and over the iron breath a hesitant, dark voice can be heard from the depth of the building; “You who long to step over this threshold, do you know what awaits you?
And I have burnt all I adored And now adore all that I burnt.” As he uttered the two last lines, Mihalevitch.
They had much discussion upon the question whether marriage was a prejudice or a crime, and whether men were born equal or not, and precisely what individuality consists in. Things.
Queer things happen in the world: you may live a long while with some people, and be on friendly terms with them, and never once speak openly with them from your soul; with others you have scarcely time to get acquainted, and all at once you are pouring out to him – or he to you – all your secrets, as though you were at confession.
In ieder geval zal het bij een juiste inrichting van der maatschappij geen enkel verschil maken of iemand dom of verstandig, slecht of goed is.
Her presence seared me like a flame... but what did I care what kind of fire this was in which I burned and melted, when it was bliss to burn and melt?
Goed is het waar wij niet zijn.
Eten, drinken en weten dat je niet juister en verstandiger kunt handelen. Maar nee, de verveling wordt je te machtig. Je wilt mensen hebben, al was het maar om ze uit te schelden, maar je wilt mensen hebben.
Arkady went on with the look of a man who has gone into a swamp and feels that with every step he is sinking deeper and deeper and still hurries on, in the hope of extricating himself sooner.