The Duel and Other Stories Quotes

“Warmly and impulsively he put his arms round her and covered her knees and hands with kisses. Then when she muttered something and shuddered with the thought of the past, he stroked her hair, and looking into her face, realised that this unhappy, sinful woman was the one creature near and dear to him, whom no one could replace. When he went out of the house and got into the carriage he wanted to return home alive.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories

“I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I'm bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else's theories, in literary types—in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: 'Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!' And that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!" Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said: "Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight from nature.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories

“To be in continual ecstasies over nature shows poverty of imagination. In comparison with what my imagination can give me, all these streams and rocks are trash, and nothing else.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories

“In spite of his clumsiness and rough manner, he was a peaceable man, of infinite kindliness and goodness of heart, always ready to be of use.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories

“Since Samoylenko had left Dorpat, where he had studied medicine, he had rarely seen a German and had not read a single German book, but, in his opinion, every harmful idea in politics or science was due to the Germans. Where he had got this notion he could not have said himself, but he held it firmly.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories

“The humane studies of which you speak will only satisfy human thought when, as they advance, they meet the exact sciences and progress side by side with them. Whether they will meet under a new microscope, or in the new monologues of a new Hamlet, or in a new religion, I do not know, but I expect the Earth will be covered in a crust of ice before it comes to pass.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories

“No one remembered Vladimir Semyonitch. He was utterly forgotten.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories

“The brother and sister talked till midnight without understanding each other.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories

“THE DUEL I It was eight o'clock in the morning—the time when the officers, the local officials, and the visitors usually took their morning dip in the sea after the hot, stifling night, and then went into the pavilion to drink tea or coffee.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories

“This is the age of nerves; there is no help for it.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories