Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.

Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late.

I was as happy as a fish in water, and I could have stayed in that room for ever, have never left that place.

To tell about a drunken muzhik's beating his wife is incomparably harder than to compose a whole tract about the 'woman question.'

Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.

Behind me there are already so many memories (...) Lots of memories, but no point in remembering them, and ahead of me a long, long road with nothing to aim for ... I just don't want to go along it.

What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment?