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A typist on salary scale 9 gets 60 roubles a month. Of course her lover keeps her in silk stockings, but think what she has to put up with in exchange for silk. He won’t just want to make the usual sort of love to her, he’ll make her do it the French way. They’re a lot of bastards, those Frenchmen, if you ask me
‘By kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You’ll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be.
A grown woman and you’re ready to poke anything into your mouth like a child. Don’t you dare! I warn you that neither I nor Doctor Bormenthal will lift a finger for you when your stomach finally gives out . . .’
If I say something, that means that it is based on some fact from which I draw my conclusions.
Ruin, therefore, is not caused by lavatories but it’s something that starts in people’s heads.
‘How do you find time for it, Philip Philipovich?’ asked the doctor with awe. ‘One can find time for everything if one is never in a hurry,’
‘No one is to be beaten,’, said Philip Philipovich heatedly, ‘remember that once and for all. Animals and people can only be influenced by persuasion.
Anyhow, what is freedom? Vapour, mirage, fiction . . . democratic rubbish . . .
Now as I walk along the streets I look at every dog I meet with secret horror. God knows what is lurking in their minds.
‘So what if I had to eat out of dustbins? At least it was an honest living.
‘You belong to the lowest possible stage of development,’ Philip Philipovich shouted him down. ‘You are still in the formative stage. You are intellectually weak, all your actions are purely bestial. Yet you allow yourself in the presence of two university-educated men to offer advice, with quite intolerable familiarity, on a cosmic scale and of quite cosmic stupidity, on the redistribution of wealth . . . and at the same time you eat toothpaste . . .’
I’m sixty, old enough to give you advice. Never do anything criminal, no matter for what reason. Keep your hands clean all your life.’
the least objectionable thing he does! The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog’s heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!’
