“Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“They say, tell me what you've read and I'll tell you who you are.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“There is something sad, dreamy, and in the highest degree poetic in a lonely grave ... You can hear its silence, and in this silence you sense the presence of the soul of the unknown person who lies under the cross. Is it good for this soul in the steppe? Does it languish”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life -- it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“When you look for a long time into the deep sky, without taking your eyes away, your thoughts and soul merge for some reason in an awareness of loneliness. You begin to feel yourself irremediably alone, and all that you once considered close and dear becomes infinitely distant and devoid of value.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“So it is in life... In search of the truth, people make two steps forward and one step back. Sufferings, mistakes, and the tedium of life throw them back, but the thirst for truth and a stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Maybe they’ll row their way to the real truth...”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“There are a great many wicked people in the world," said Emelyan.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“Everything is quiet, peaceful, and against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of starvation. . . . And such a state of things is obviously what we want; apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
“for a crippled man like me , personal happiness was possible only in dreams.”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Complete Short Novels
Anton Chekhov
Born place: in Taganrog, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire
Born date January 29, 1860
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“I am writing this book because we're all going to die - In the loneliness of my own life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife far away, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our deaths, sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my broke heart in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Visions of Cody
“It was my turn to be silent while a small family of moments crossed my path, single file, from the left, sticking their tongues out at me.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from The Hand of Oberon
“The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.”
― John Taylor Gatto, quote from Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
“For the Vanderbilts lived in a day when flaunting one’s money was not only accepted but celebrated. What may have started as playacting, as dressing up as dukes and princesses for fancy dress balls in fairytale palaces, soon developed into a firm conviction that they were indeed the new American nobility.”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
“... you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.”
― Nell Freudenberger, quote from The Dissident
The Color Purple
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