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.

— Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev Quotes

I should not wish ever to have it repeated; but I should consider myself unhappy if I had never experienced it.

— Ivan Turgenev

She was frightened of him – his manner was severely cold and aloof... I have never seen anymore more exquisitely calm, more self-assured or more imperious.

— Ivan Turgenev

It seemed to me both that I had known her for a long time and that I had known nothing and had not lived before she came.

— Ivan Turgenev

Like a beetle tied by the leg, I hovered incessantly around the beloved wing; I believe I would have liked to remain there forever... but that was impossible.

— Ivan Turgenev

There was a time when I used to say: ‘I will do many things in life, and refuse to die before I have completed those tasks, for I am a giant.’: but now I have indeed a giant’s task in hand- the task of dying as though death were nothing to me.

— Ivan Turgenev

But you have brought me yourself,... and that is the best bringing of all.

— Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev tended to believe that man is never destined to experience happiness save as something ephemeral and inevitably foredoomed.

— Ivan Turgenev

Both were silent, but the very way in which they were silent, in which they were sitting together, was expressive of confidential intimacy; each of them seemed not even to be thinking of his companion, while secretly rejoicing in his presence.

— Ivan Turgenev

We’ll meet again, won’t we?’ ‘As you wish,’ answered Bazarov. ‘In that case we will.

— Ivan Turgenev

In losing his past, he lost everything.

— Ivan Turgenev

Like all women who have not succeeded in loving, she wanted something, without herself knowing what. Strictly speaking, she wanted nothing; but it seemed to her that she wanted everything.

— Ivan Turgenev

A lesson to you, young man. And the whole thing arises from not knowing how to say good-bye,-to break bonds in time. You now, seem to have jumped out successfully. Look out, don’t fall in again. Farewell.

— Ivan Turgenev

It is sweet to be the sole source, the arbitrary and irresponsible source of the greatest joys and profoundest miseries to someone else.

— Ivan Turgenev

But what did I want to say to you? That I loved you? There was a time when the phrase ‘I love’ had for me no meaning; and now it will have less than ever, seeing that love is a form, and that my particular embodiment of it is fast lapsing towards dissolution.

— Ivan Turgenev

Here, in the cool shade, she read and worked, or surrendered herself to that sensation of perfect peace with which we are all presumably familiar and whose charm lies in a barely conscious and silent observation of the sweeping wave of life that for ever rolls all round us as well as within us.

— Ivan Turgenev

The Bacchantes have surrounded her, and whirled her off into the night, into the dark. Here you must paint the swirling clouds of smoke and everything in chaos. Only their cries can be heard, and her wreath is left lying on the bank.

— Ivan Turgenev

Pretty little feet,′ she thought as she slowly and lightly mounted the stone steps of the terrace which were scorching in the sun. ‘Pretty little feet, you say... Well, before long he shall be kneeling at them.

— Ivan Turgenev

Jealous Othello, ready for murder, was suddenly transformed into a schoolboy.

— Ivan Turgenev

That the heart cannot choose but love,′ repeated Zinaida. ‘That’s where poetry’s so fine; it tells us what is not, what’s not only better than what is, but much more like the truth, “cannot choose but love,” – it might want not to, but it can’t help it.

— Ivan Turgenev

My passion amused her. She made fun of me, played with me, and tormented me. It is sweet to be the sole source, the arbitrary and irresponsible source of the greatest joys and profoundest miseries to someone else.

— Ivan Turgenev
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