The Schoolmistress, and other stories Quotes

“And no one thought her attractive, and life was passing drearily, without affection, without friendly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances. How awful it would have been in her position if she had fallen in love!”
― Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, and other stories

“He had lived hitherto in unruffled calm, as though in drunken half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he was suddenly aware of a dreadful pain in his heart. The careless idler and drunkard found himself quite suddenly in the position of a busy man, weighed down by anxieties and haste, and even struggling with nature.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, and other stories

“He prattled on mechanically to get a little relief from his depressing feelings.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, and other stories

“There is no wall that cannot be broken through, but the heroes of the modern romance, so far as I know them, are too timid, spiritless, lazy, and oversensitive, and are too ready to resign themselves to the thought that they are doomed to failure, that personal life has disappointed them; instead of struggling they merely criticize, calling the world vulgar and forgetting that their criticism passes little by little into vulgarity.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, and other stories

“but he had a peculiar talent—a talent for humanity. He possessed an extraordinarily fine delicate scent for pain in general.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, and other stories

“There is vice," he thought, "but neither consciousness of sin nor hope of salvation.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, and other stories

“He went out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends—one in a crushed broad-brimmed hat, with an affectation of artistic untidiness; the other in a sealskin cap, a man not poor, though he affected to belong to the Bohemia of learning.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, and other stories

“In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one's heart sank.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, and other stories