A Double Life Quotes

“That prisoner of society’s world,
That sacrifice to vanity,
The blind slave of custom,
That small-souled being isn't you.”
― Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life

“To you the offering of this thought,
The greeting of my poetry,
To you this work of solitude,
O slaves of din and vanity.
In silence did my sad sigh name
You Cecily's unmet by me,
All of you Psyches without wings,
Mute sisters of my soul!
God grant you, unknown family,
One sacred dream mid sinful lies,
In the prison of this narrow life
Just one brief burst of that other life.”
― Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life

“He was one of those people who in all of their feelings and actions seem to be walking along a steep, downhill slope. They lack the strength to stop for a minute, and with each step, they get more and more carried away. Like all of them, Dmitry took this insufficiency of strength for fervency of character and insuperable storminess of passion.”
― Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life

“Society women have achieved the wondrous art of contriving thirty variations on a phrase that means nothing even the first time”
― Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life

“They flicked the reins and were carried far ahead of the men, with that violent female daring which is so far from manly valor.”
― Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life

“Vera Vladimirovna was, as we have seen, very proud of her daughter's successful upbringing, especially perhaps because it had been accomplished not without difficulty, because it took time and skill to destroy in her soul its innate thirst for delight and enthusiasm.”
― Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life

“Society, with all its strictness is sometimes kind-hearted: depending on the circumstances, it looks with such Christian forgiveness upon powerful people, upon prominent and wealthy women! And besides, in the aristocratic educated world, everything is angled so smoothly, the sharp edges so blunted, and each monstrous and rotten affair called by such decent language that every shameful thing is glossed over in such fine circumstances, effortlessly and quietly.”
― Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life

“Zealously she paid her debt to virtue and morality—all the more so because she had set about this a little late without ever thinking for the better half of her life that there would be such a price, but then, becoming convinced that it was unavoidable, she—one must do her justice—endeavored with an improbable commitment to pay the aforementioned debt and all interest that had accrued.”
― Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life