MihaElla > Recent Status Updates

Ah, Julia! nothing but a strong pre-possession,& my friendship for you, could remove the danger of such a scene. Yes! friend of my heart, I must acknowledge my weakness. There is a youth in New-York, who has long been master of my too sensitive heart,& without him life will be a burthen. Cruel fate divides us now, but when invited by your aunt to Park-Place, Oh, rapture unutterable! I shall be near my Regulus...

Antonio has been here again,& he solicited an audience with me in private—of course I granted it, for friendship hallows all that is done under its mantle. It was a moonlight night— mild Luna shedding a balmy light on surrounding objects,&, if possible, rendering my heart more sensitive than ever. One solitary glimmering star showed by its paly quiverings the impress of evening, while not a cloud...

“I mean by a hero, a man whose character is unstained by any low or degenerate vices, or even feelings," said Julia, with a little more than her ordinary enthusiasm; "whose courage is as natural as it is daring; who is above fear, except of doing wrong; whose person is an index of his mind, and whose mind is filled with images of glory; that's what I call a hero, aunt.”

Your letter must have interested you deeply not to have noticed the thunder—you, who are so timid and fearful of the flashes

Foolishly fearful,you would say,if you were not afraid of hurting my feelings,I know, said Julia.

It is a natural dread,& therefore not to be laughed at,answered Charles mildly

Then there is natural fear,but no natural love, Mr. Charles;now you are finely caught,cried Julia exultingly

The first time Julia read this letter she was certainly disappointed. It contained no descriptions of the lovely scenery of the west. The moon had risen & the sun had set on the lakes of the interior,& Anna had said not one word of either. But the third and fourth time of reading began to afford more pleasure,& at the thirteenth perusal she pronounced it charming. There was evidently much to be understood;...

Men, you say, are too gross to feel a pure friendship; in the first place, please to explain yourself on this point

Why I mean, that your friendships are generally interested; that it requires services and good offices to support it.

While that of women depends on—

Feeling alone.

But what excites this feeling? asked Charles with a smile.

What? why sympathy—and a knowledge of each other's good qualities...

Life is only given us once,& one wants to live it boldly,with full consciousness & beauty.One wants to play a striking,independent,noble part;one wants to make history so that next generations may not have the right to say of each of us that we were nonentities or worse.I believe what is going on about us is inevitable & not without a purpose,but what have I to do with that inevitability?Why should my ego be lost?

“...What was that love? It's positively absurd now," she said, going to the window and looking down at the canal.
"All this love only clouds the conscience and confuses the mind. The meaning of life is to be found only in one thing—fighting. To get one's heel on the vile head of the serpent and to crush it! That's the meaning of life. In that alone or in nothing.”

It is fine to be an artist, a poet, a dramatist," I thought, "but since that is not vouchsafed to me, if only I could go in for mysticism! If only I had a grain of some faith to add to the unruffled peace and serenity that fills the soul!

I have made up my mind to go abroad with you tomorrow.Accept me as a recruit. Have you read Balzac? Have you? At the end of his novel 'Père Goriot' the hero looks down upon Paris from the top of a hill and threatens the town: 'Now we shall settle our account,' and after this he begins a new life. So when I look out of the train window at Petersburg for the last time, I shall say, 'Now we shall settle our account!

You are afraid of life—as afraid of it as an Oriental who sits all day on a cushion smoking his hookah. Yes, you read a great deal, and a European coat fits you well, but yet with what tender, purely Oriental, pasha-like care you protect yourself from hunger, cold, physical effort, from pain and uneasiness! How early your soul has taken to its dressing-gown!...

Tell me honestly, as a friend, what do you think about me?

What am I to say? he said, raising his eyebrows. I love you and think nothing but good of you. But if you wish that I should speak generally about the question that interests you,he went on,rubbing his sleeve near the elbow & frowning, "then, my dear,you know..To follow freely the promptings of the heart does not always give good people happiness...

Like Orlov, she wanted to be unhappy out of obstinacy. To spite herself & everything in the world, she lay for days together on the sofa,desiring & expecting nothing but evil for herself. Probably she was picturing to herself Orlov's return & the inevitable quarrels with him; then his growing indifference to her, his infidelities;then how they would separate;& perhaps these agonising thoughts gave her satisfaction

Well,now for the evils of marriage.It's high time for you to understand that there are no evils in the system itself;what is the matter is that you don't know yourselves what you want from marriage.What is it you want?In legal and illegal cohabitation, in every sort of union and cohabitation,good or bad, the underlying reality is the same.You ladies live for that underlying reality alone: for you it's everything...

“I don't understand you, all the same. You are not a student and she is not a dressmaker. You are both of you people with means. I should have thought you might have arranged a separate flat for her."

"No, I couldn't. Read Turgenev."

"Why should I read him? I have read him already."

You will excuse me, reading at breakfast is a habit I can't get over. But I can do two things at once—read and listen

Read away. . .You shall keep your habits and your freedom. But why do you look so solemn? Are you always like that in the morning, or is it only to-day? Aren't you glad?

Yes, I am. But I must own I am a little overwhelmed.

Why? You had plenty of time to prepare yourself for my descent upon you..

[...] that exceptional intelligence could not grasp many things which are understood even by some stupid people. For instance, he was absolutely unable to understand why people are depressed, why they weep, shoot themselves, and even kill others; why they fret about things that do not affect them personally, and why they laugh when they read Gogol or Shtchedrin . . . .

When Orlov took a newspaper or book,or met people,an ironical smile began to come into his eyes,& his whole countenance assumed an expression of light mockery in which there was no malice.Before reading or hearing anything he always had his irony in readiness,as a savage has his shield. It was an habitual irony,like some old liquor brewed years ago,&now it came into his face probably as it were by reflex action

...then it seemed to Volodya that the room, Nyuta, the sunrise and himself—all melted together in one sensation of extraordinary, incredible bliss, for which one might give up one's whole life and face eternal torments. . . . But half a minute passed and all that vanished. Volodya saw only a fat, plain face, distorted by an expression of repulsion, and he himself suddenly felt a loathing for what had happened...

[...] And you know he has a way with him! When he told me he was in love with me, there was something brutal in his face, like a Circassian.

"Really!" gasped maman, going off into a peal of laughter. "Really!
How he does remind me of his father!”

It's only very proud people who are silent & love solitude, You are proud, Volodya. Why do you look at me like that from under your brows? Look me straight in the face, if you please! Yes,now then,clumsy seal!

Volodya made up his mind to speak. Wanting to smile, he twitched his lower lip, blinked,& again put his hand to his forehead

"I . . . I love you," he said.

Nyuta raised her eyebrows in surprise,& laughed.

In ancient times a happy man grew at last frightened of his happiness —it was so great!—and to propitiate the gods he brought as a sacrifice his favourite ring. Do you know, I, too, like Polykrates, begin to be uneasy of my happiness. It seems strange to me that from morning to night I feel nothing but joy; it fills my whole being and smothers all other feelings. I don't know what sadness, grief, or boredom is.

I was not thinking of it . . . I was not thinking of it,she said, wringing her hands in despair.

& Kovrin followed her & went on talking, with the same radiant, enthusiastic face:

I want a love that will dominate me altogether;& that love only you,Tanya, can give me. I am happy! I am happy!

She was overwhelmed,& huddling & shrinking together, seemed ten years older all at once, while he thought her beautiful...

“The Romans used to say: Mens sana in corpore sano."

"Not everything the Greeks and the Romans said is true. Exaltation, enthusiasm, ecstasy—all that distinguishes prophets, poets, martyrs for the idea, from the common folk—is repellent to the animal side of man—that is, his physical health. I repeat, if you want to be healthy and normal, go to the common herd.”

[...] But what a restless, jerky tone! What nervous, almost hysterical passion! Here was an article, one would have thought, with most peaceable and impersonal contents: the subject of it was the Russian Antonovsky Apple. But Yegor Semyonitch began it with "Audiatur altera pars," and finished it with "Sapienti sat"; and ...

“On the surface of the ground, as you see, is frost; but if you raise the thermometer on a stick fourteen feet above the ground, there it is warm. . . . Why is that?"

"I really don't know," said Kovrin, and he laughed.

"H'm! . . . One can't know everything, of course. . . . However large the intellect may be, you can't find room for everything in it. I suppose you still go in chiefly for philosophy?"

She talked a long while & with great feeling. For some reason the idea came into his head that he might grow fond of this little, weak, talkative creature, might be carried away & fall in love; This thought touched & amused him; he bent down to her sweet, preoccupied face & hummed softly:

             “Onyegin, I won't conceal it;
                I madly love Tatiana. . .”

I am not scolding; I am speaking. You might find something to do, my dear, instead of sitting with your hands in your lap trying to pick a quarrel. Upon my word, women are beyond my comprehension! Beyond my comprehension! How can they waste whole days doing nothing? A man works like an ox, like a b-beast, while his wife, the partner of his life, sits like a pretty doll, sits and does nothing but...

There was no one,&, indeed, who would come here at midnight [cemetery] ? But Startsev waited,& as though the moonlight warmed his passion, he waited passionately,&, in imagination, pictured kisses and embraces. He sat near the monument for half an hour, then paced up & down the side avenues, with his hat in his hand, waiting & thinking of the many women and girls buried in these tombs who had been beautiful and...

“By now he had his own pair of horses, and a coachman called Panteleimon, in a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was still warm, warm as it is in autumn.”

...yeah I know, we all have our oddities 🤔 I like this one, I am myself living in this district called Pantelimon 😁 (well, sigh, one ‘e’ less but ...I guess the local authorities here were mistaken...with ‘e’ sounds better)