In my case there was no first love. I began with the second.

So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me - a long, long road without a goal.

Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.

Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep.

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

We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we're barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.

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