The River of Life, and Other Stories Quotes

“A heavy slumber enlocked his body; but, as always with men who have long deprived themselves of sleep, he could not sleep at once.”
― A.I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“There is something of the preacher essential in every Russian intellectual. It is in our blood; it has been instilled by the whole of Russian literature in the last generations”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“It seems that man was right who said that parting to love is like wind to a fire: it blows out a small one, and makes a large one blaze.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Can one remember the words uttered in the first moment of meeting between a mother and son, husband and wife, or lover and lover? The simplest, most ordinary, even ridiculous words are said, if they were put down exactly upon paper. But each word is opportune and infinitely dear because it is uttered by the dearest voice in all the world.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Why are you so stubborn, you little fool? Some one talks business to you, and you hold up your nose. As if nobody in the world was cleverer than you!”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“How could I disbelieve? Charms are in our destiny.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“up till now I have retained a deep conviction that a person is nowhere revealed so clearly as when he eats.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Can a man escape what Fate has doomed? It is useless for a man to be anxious the last days of his life.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“You can come and sit by our gate, and listen to the noise of a feasting; but we are clever enough to come to you for a dinner.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Progress is a law—and theft too has its creation.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“But it is well known that the bourgeois pater-familias was specially devised by Heaven to utter commonplaces and trivialities.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Life has been so meagre, so insipid, so intolerably dull to eager and high-spirited souls!”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“But I tell you that you cannot entice a true thief, and thief by vocation, into the prose of honest vegetation by any gingerbread reward, or by the offer of a secure position, or by the gift of money, or by a woman’s love: because there is here a permanent beauty of risk, a fascinating abyss of danger, the delightful sinking of the heart, the impetuous pulsation of life, the ecstasy!”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Some have a positive vocation for breaking open safes: from their tenderest childhood they are attracted by the mysteries of every kind of complicated mechanism—bicycles, sewing machines, clock-work toys and watches.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“The pickpockets’ profession demands extraordinary nimbleness and agility, a terrific certainty of movement, not to mention a ready wit, a talent for observation and strained attention.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“It hardly can be called a sin, If something’s funny and you grin! …”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Though you are Ivanov the seventh, you’re a fool all the same.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“There was no sorrow till the devil pumped it up,” as we say in Russian.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“But the one thing I don’t understand is the incessant strain of the mind and will, the diabolical waste of spiritual strength.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“The man who fights learns to pray, you know. It’s a splendid Russian proverb.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Still—nowadays, the most impossible things are possible.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Russia’s joy’s in the bottle!”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Couldn’t you give me one small smoke? I’m dying to smoke. And I haven’t a cent to buy them. “Blessed are the poor. … Poverty’s no crime,” as they say—but sheer indecency.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“I can’t understand these student fellows. They don’t want to study. They brandish a red flag, and then shoot themselves. They don’t want to understand what their parents must feel.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Surely the obscure soul of the dog must be far more susceptible to the vibrations of thought than the human. … Do they not bark because they feel the presence of a dead man?”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“Ah, I think that nothing in the world vanishes utterly—nothing—not only what is said, but what is thought. All our deeds and words and thoughts are little streams, trickling springs underground.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“And who can say whether my thoughts, independent of weight and time and the obstacles of matter, are not at the same moment being caught by mysterious, delicate, but unconscious receivers in the brain of an inhabitant of Mars as well as in the brain of the dog who barks outside?”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“I think that a human thought is like a current from some electric centre, an intense, radiating vibration of the imponderable ether, poured out in the spaces of the world, and passing with equal ease through the atoms of stone, iron, and air.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“It is true the precious schoolboy is very nearly ridiculous, but a sacred respect for his proud free self is already growing up within him, a respect for everything that has been corroded in us by spiritual poverty and anxious paternal morality. We must go to the devil.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia

“It was all born suddenly, in a tempestuous wind. Eagles awoke out of turkey eggs.”
― A. I. Kuprin, The River of Life, and Other Stories: Exploring Human Emotions and Complexities in Early 20th-Century Russia