and up till now I have not
done a single thing to help her. What can I do? I think and think and
cannot make it out. I only see clearly that we are rushing down an
inclined plane, but to what, the devil knows. They say that poverty
threatens us and that in poverty there is disgrace, but that too I
cannot understand, since I was never poor.

* * * * *

The spiritual life of these women is as gray and dull as their faces
and dresses; they speak of science, literature, tendencies, and the
like, only because they are the wives and sisters of scholars and
literary men; were they the wives and sisters of inspectors or of
dentists, they would speak with the same zeal of fires or teeth.
To allow them to speak of science, which is foreign to them, and to
listen to them, is to flatter their ignorance.

* * * * *

Essentially all this is crude and meaningless, and romantic love
appears as meaningless as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down
a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all
this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one
woman is alive--gray-haired, she is sitting in a box in the theatre,
quiet and majestic, and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless,
since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven,
and it would be strange not to forgive.

* * * * *

Olga Ivanovna regarded old chairs, stools, sofas, with the same
respectful tenderness as she regarded old dogs and horses, and her
room, therefore, was something like an alms-house for furniture.
Round the mirror, on all tables and shelves, stood photographs of
uninteresting, half-forgotten people; on the walls hung pictures at
which nobody ever looked; and it was always dark in the room, because
there burnt there only one lamp with a blue shade.

* * * * *

If you cry "Forward," you must without fail explain in which direction
one must go. Do you not see that, if without explaining the
direction, you fire off this word simultaneously at a monk and at a
revolutionary, they will proceed in precisely opposite directions?

* * * * *

It is said in Holy Writ: "Fathers, do not irritate your children,"
even the wicked and good-for-nothing children; but the fathers
irritate me, irritate me terribly. My contemporaries chime in with
them and