I don't see why it's impossible to express everything that's on one's mind.

I only know that I feel tired, antiquated; I feel as though I had been living a long, long time.

All human beings hang by a thread, an abyss may open under their feet at any moment, and yet they have to go and invent all sortsof difficulties for themselves and spoil their lives.

Only one thing bothered me: at this very moment, as they say, of inexplicable bliss there would be a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach and my abdomen would be assailed by a melancholy, cold shivering. In the end I couldn't abide such happiness and ran away.

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

The temerity to believe in nothing.

Take what you can yourself, and don't let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life.