Nicolas Slunsky

“HELENA. What a fine day! Not too hot. [A pause.]

VOITSKI. A fine day to hang oneself.”
― Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

“Full freedom will come only when it makes no difference whether to live or not to live. That’s the goal for everyone.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“As long as we desire, we can do without happiness: we expect to achieve it. If happiness fails to come, hope persists, and the charm of illusion lasts as long as the passion that causes it. So this condition is sufficient in itself, and the anxiety it inflicts is a sort of enjoyment that compensates for reality… Woe to him who has nothing left to desire… We enjoy less what we obtain than what we hope for, and we are happy only before being happy.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise

“All smoke and steam...all seems for ever changing, on all sides new forms, phantoms flying after phantoms, while in reality it is all the same and the same again; everything hurrying, flying towards something, and everything vanishing without a trace, attaining to nothing.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Smoke