* * * * *

The spiritual life of these women is as gray and dull as their faces and dresses; they speak of science, literature, tendencies, and the like, only because they are the wives and sisters of scholars and literary men; were they the wives and sisters of inspectors or of dentists, they would speak with the same zeal of fires or teeth.  To allow them to speak of science, which is foreign to them, and to listen to them, is to flatter their ignorance.

* * * * *

Essentially all this is crude and meaningless, and romantic love appears as meaningless as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people.  But when one listens to music, all this is:  that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive—­gray-haired, she is sitting in a box in the theatre, quiet and majestic, and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning.  And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive.

* * * * *

Olga Ivanovna regarded old chairs, stools, sofas, with the same respectful tenderness as she regarded old dogs and horses, and her room, therefore, was something like an alms-house for furniture.  Round the mirror, on all tables and shelves, stood photographs of uninteresting, half-forgotten people; on the walls hung pictures at which nobody ever looked; and it was always dark in the room, because there burnt there only one lamp with a blue shade.

* * * * *

If you cry “Forward,” you must without fail explain in which direction one must go.  Do you not see that, if without explaining the direction, you fire off this word simultaneously at a monk and at a revolutionary, they will proceed in precisely opposite directions?

* * * * *

It is said in Holy Writ:  “Fathers, do not irritate your children,” even the wicked and good-for-nothing children; but the fathers irritate me, irritate me terribly.  My contemporaries chime in with them and the youngsters follow, and every minute they strike me in the face with their smooth words.

* * * * *

That the aunt suffered and did not show it gave him the impression of a trick.

* * * * *

O.I. was in constant motion; such women, like bees, carry about a fertilizing pollen....

* * * * *

Don’t marry a rich woman—­she will drive you out of the house; don’t marry a poor woman—­you won’t sleep; but marry the freest freedom, the lot and life of a Cossack. (Ukrainian saying.)

* * * * *

Aliosha:  “I often hear people say:  ’Before marriage there is romance, and then—­goodbye, illusion!’ How heartless and coarse it is.”