* * * * *

Vera:  “I do not respect you, because you married so strangely, because nothing came of you....  That is why I have secrets from you.”

* * * * *

It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated.  We should seek a simple solution.

* * * * *

There is no Monday which will not give its place to Tuesday.

* * * * *

I am happy and satisfied, sister, but if I were born a second time and were asked:  “Do you want to marry?” I should answer:  “No.”  “Do you want to have money?” “No....”

* * * * *

Lenstchka liked dukes and counts in novels, not ordinary persons.  She loved the chapters in which there is love, pure and ideal not sensual.  Descriptions of nature she did not like.  She preferred conversations to descriptions.  While reading the beginning she would glance impatiently at the end.  She did not remember the names of authors.  She wrote with a pencil in the margins:  “Wonderful!” “Beautiful!” or “Serve him right!”

* * * * *

Lenstchka sang without opening her mouth.

* * * * *

Post coitum:  We Balderiovs always excelled in vigor and health.

* * * * *

He drove in a cab, and, as he watched his son walking away, thought:  “Perhaps, he belongs to the race of men who will no longer trundle in scurvy cabs, as I do, but will fly through the skies in balloons.”

* * * * *

She is so beautiful that it is even frightening; dark eye-brows.

* * * * *

The son says nothing, but the wife feels him to be an enemy; she feels that he has overheard everything....

* * * * *

What a lot of idiots there are among ladies.  People get so used to it that they do not notice it.

* * * * *

They often go to the theatre and read serious magazines—­and yet are spiteful and immoral.

* * * * *

Nat:  “I never have fits of hysterics.  I am not a pampered darling."[1]

[Footnote 1:  This and the following few passages are from the rough draft of Chekhov’s play Three Sisters.]

* * * * *

Nat:  (continually to her sisters):  “O, how ugly you have grown.  O, how old you do look!”

* * * * *

To live one must have something to hang on to....  In the provinces only the body works, not the spirit.

* * * * *

You won’t become a saint through other people’s sins.