"[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh."

"Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape."

"Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs."

"One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven."

"Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal."

"Byelokurov . . . began a long-winded disquisition on the malady of the age -- pessimism. He talked confidently, in a tone that suggested that I was opposing him. Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, burnt-up steppe cannot induce such deep depression as one man when he sits and talks, and one does not know when he will go."

"If you can’t distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn’t undertake philanthropic work."

"Everyone has the same God; only people differ."

"The sea has neither meaning nor pity."

"Why did you marry me into this family, mother?" said Lipa. "One has to be married, daughter. It was not us who ordained it."

"It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it."

"There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent."

"No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith."

"What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all."

"Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier."

"Death can only be profitable: there’s no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous."

"Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the entrance. The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and severe, stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river, and there ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew with bare roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below with an unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive cry, and there one always felt that one must sit down and write a ballad."

"Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man."

"Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it."

"Good breeding doesn't mean that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice when someone else does."

"By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress."

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."

"Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another."

"Who keeps the tavern and serves up the drinks? The peasant. Who squanders and drinks up money belonging to the peasant commune, the school, the church? The peasant. Who would steal from his neighbor, commit arson, and falsely denounce another for a bottle of vodka? The peasant."

"All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still."

"(Is there a book that you just absolutely couldn't imagine not owning, whether or not you think you're ever going to go back and reread it?) LE: Yes: the collected stories of Chekhov. That's what I read if I'm disturbed, depressed, or can't get back to sleep. I have Chekhov next to the bed...The humanity, and the clarity, and the sense of acceptance, and I wouldn't really say kindness so much as acceptance in Chekhov's work-I go back to it constantly. The books I take with me on my book tours are always the ones that are sustaining. I take Chekhov, and I often take Middlemarch."

"While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave."

"People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share."

"There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail."

"As Chekhov said: ‘Others may be a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself drop by drop.’"

"I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them."

"Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?"

"She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …"

"There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science."

"Thought and beauty, like a hurricane or waves, should not know conventional, delimited forms."

"Between "there is a God" and "there is no God" lies a whole vast tract, which the really wise man crosses with great effort. A Russian knows one or other of these two extremes, and the middle tract between them does not interest him; and therefore he usually knows nothing, or very little. (Diary, 1897)"

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.""

"I read Chekhov, who meant a lot to me."

"Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers."

"Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is to write, and only to write."

"There are in life such confluences of circumstances that render the reproach that we are not Voltaires most inopportune."

"It’s worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork."

"Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be."

"There are plenty of good people, but only a very, very few are precise and disciplined."

"When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace."

"Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games."

"By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. ... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky."

"The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy."

"People love talking of their diseases, although they are the most uninteresting things in their lives."

"I can’t accept “our nervous age,” since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell."