Don’t force me into saying what I don’t want to say, and what I won’t say.
A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground; its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn’t it strange? The saddest and deadest of things is yet so like the gayest and most vital of creatures?
We’re young, we’re not monsters, no fools: we’ll conquer happiness for ourselves.
I walked in the meadows of green grieving for my life.
I’m incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn’t want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I’d never experienced it.
Only one thing bothered me: at this very moment, as they say, of inexplicable bliss there would be a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach and my abdomen would be assailed by a melancholy, cold shivering. In the end I couldn’t abide such happiness and ran away.
It’s all romanticism, nonsense, rottenness, art.
Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.
Nature creates while destroying, and doesn’t care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn’t extinguished, as long as death doesn’t lose its rights.
Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there’ll come a time when you’ll start asking just for a crust.
Everyone needs help from everyone else.
I was as happy as a fish in water, and I could have stayed in that room for ever, have never left that place.
However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.
The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they’ve suddenly become nihilists.
What’s important is that twice two is four and all the rest’s nonsense.
In days of doubt, in days of dreary musings on my country’s fate, you alone are my comfort and support, oh great, powerful, righteous, and free Russian language!
I only know that I feel tired, antiquated; I feel as though I had been living a long, long time.
I am a flirt: I have no heart: I have an actor’s nature.
Whatever man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself...
You may live a long while with some people and be on friendly terms with them and never speak openly with them from your soul.