Oblomov

by Ivan Goncharov

"When all is bright, one's life suddenly becomes overshadowed with some sinister influence. Is there no resource against it?" "Yes, there is one. That resource lies in life itself. Without such phantoms and such questionings life would soon become a wearisome business."

The love beheld in that vision was a love which, unfading and indestructible, expressed itself on the features of husband and wife only during seasons of mutual sorrow, and shone forth only in slow, silent glances of mutual sympathy, and voiced itself only in a constant, joint endurance of the trials of life as he and she restrained the tears, and choked back the sobs, which those trials called forth.