Anton Chekhov

“ I am already twenty-three, I have already been at work for a long while, and my brain has dried up, and I've grown thinner, plainer, older, and there is no relief of any sort, and time goes and it seems all the while as if I am going away from the real, the beautiful life, farther and farther away, down some precipice. ”

“ Natasha is a beautiful and honest creature, straight and honourable--that's my opinion. I love and respect my wife; understand it, I respect her, and I insist that others should respect her too. I repeat, she's an honest and honourable person, and all your disapproval is simply silly ... [Pause] In the second place, you seem to be annoyed because I am not a professor, and am not engaged in study. But I work for the zemstvo, I am a member of the district council, and I consider my service as worthy and as high as the service of science. ”

“ You respect him, you think highly of him. ... It is true that he is not handsome, but he is so honourable and clean ... people don't marry from love, but in order to do one's duty. I think so, at any rate, and I'd marry without being in love. Whoever he was, I should marry him, so long as he was a decent man. Even if he was old. ...
IRINA. I was always waiting until we should be settled in Moscow, there I should meet my true love; I used to think about him, and love him. ... But it's all turned out to be nonsense, all nonsense. ”

“ How strange everything really is! [Pause] When the fire broke out, I hurried off home; when I get there I see the house is whole, uninjured, and in no danger, but my two girls are standing by the door in just their underclothes, their mother isn't there, the crowd is excited, horses and dogs are running about, and the girls' faces are so agitated, terrified, beseeching, and I don't know what else. ”

“ And when a little more time has gone by, in two or three hundred years perhaps, people will look at our present life with just the same fear, and the same contempt, and the whole past will seem clumsy and dull, and very uncomfortable, and strange. ”

“ To smash such a valuable object-- oh, Ivan Romanovitch, Ivan Romanovitch! A very bad mark for your misbehaviour!
IRINA. That clock used to belong to our mother.
CHEBUTIKIN. Perhaps. ... To your mother, your mother. Perhaps I didn't break it; it only looks as if I broke it. Perhaps we only think that we exist, when really we don't. I don't know anything, nobody knows anything. [At the door] What are you looking at? Natasha has a little romance with Protopopov, and you don't see it. ... There you sit and see nothing, and Natasha has a little romance with Protopovov. ... ”

“ They shouldn't be allowed to go home. ... Poor Fedotik is completely burnt out, there's nothing left. ...
ANFISA. Couldn't you call Ferapont, Olga dear. I can hardly manage. ...
OLGA. [Rings] They'll never answer. ... [At the door] Come here, whoever there is! [Through the open door can be seen a window, red with flame: a fire-engine is heard passing the house] How awful this is. And how I'm sick of it! [FERAPONT enters] Take these things down. ... The Kolotilin girls are down below ... and let them have them. This, too.
FERAPONT. Yes'm. In the year twelve Moscow was burning too. ”

“ Of course the poor ought to be helped, it's the duty of the rich. Bobby and little Sophy are sleeping, sleeping as if nothing at all was the matter. There's such a lot of people here, the place is full of them, wherever you go. ”