Mark André > Recent Status Updates

... if it were possible for everyone of us to describe all his secret thoughts, without hesitat­ing to disclose what he is afraid to tell and would not on any account tell others, what he is afraid to tell his best friends, and what he is even at times afraid to con­fess to himself, the world would be filled with such a stench that we should all be suffocated.

If there was time I’d play you Beethoven’s third con­certo. That’s what I’m playing now. All those feelings are in it ... just as I feel now.

I kept looking at her with the greatest interest. I was eager to get to know this strange girl. She was quite a child, but a strange child, a child of convictions, with steadfast principles, and with a pas­sionate, innate love of goodness and justice. If one really might call her a child she belonged to that class of thinking children, who are fairly numerous in our Rus­sian families.

We’ve everything we can want, but we’re always alone.

Imagine, my friend, poor me getting caught like this. She’s crammed me into a linen shirt, stuck in studs, put on me slippers, Chinese dressing-gown— combed my hair herself and pomaded it with bergamot; she wanted to sprinkle me with scent— creme brulee, but at that point I wouldn’t stand any more, I rebelled and asserted my conjugal authority_ _

Finally . . . Oh, why do I not possess the secret of lofty, powerful language, of the sublime style, to describe these grand and edifying moments of human life, which seem created expressly to prove that virtue sometimes triumphs over ingratitude, free-thinking, vice and envy!

Ivan Petrovich— there I’ve done it again. You know, it’s so difficult to say Vanya all at once. I think that’s been described somewhere by Tolstoi: two people promise to call each other by their Christian names, but they simply can’t do it and keep avoiding using any name at all.

Forgive me, Vanya. The only thing I can suggest to you by way of satisfaction is to beat me up for having troubled you un­necessarily. If you want the satisfaction, go ahead; only, for Christ’s sake, hurry up! Don’t keep me. I’ve business, I’m late....

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

a dinner more like some Balthazar’s feast, with a suggestion of something Babylonian in its brilliant luxury and style, with Veuve-Clicquot champagne, with oysters and fruit from Eliseyev’s and Milyutin’s, with all sorts of fatted calves, and all grades of the government service. This festive day was to conclude with a brilliant ball, a small birthday ball, but yet brilliant in its taste its distinction and its style

If we were to disappear would the barbarians spend their afternoons excavating our ruins? Would they preserve our census rolls and our grain-merchants' ledgers in glass cases, or devote themselves to deciphering the script of our love-letters?

After all, I can’t ask more of your heart than it can give me . . . .

A black cat has run between us.

We must put an end to this painful scene. This blind and savage outburst of unbridled jealousy shows me your character in quite a novel light.

Romancing, romancing,” the prince pronounced in an undertone, as though speaking to himself, “solitude, brooding, and novel-reading.

Love always passes, but incompatibility remains for ever.

Above all I want to use every means I can to rescue you from ruin in the circle to which you have so attached yourself, and to save you from your convictions.

I do not regret being an unimportant man.

I chafe his hands between mine. He flexes his fingers painfully. I cannot pretend to be any better than a mother comforting a child between his father's spells of wrath. It has not escaped me that an interrogator can wear two masks, speak with two voices, one harsh, one seductive.

I carry my sleeping-mat out on to the ramparts where the night breeze gives some relief from the heat. On the flat roofs of the town I can make out by moonlight the shapes of other sleepers. From under the walnut trees on the square I still hear the murmur of conversation. In the darkness a pipe glows like a firefly, wanes, glows again.

. . . be not hostile to the bottle.

“I try to employ as few hints as I can, whoever I am speaking to,” answered Natasha. “I always try, on the contrary, to be as outspoken as I can, .. .

The stranger kept grumbling and cursing the stairs as he climbed up, his language growing stronger and more violent as he pro­ceeded. Of course the staircase was narrow, filthy, steep and never lighted; but the language I heard on the third floor was such that I could never have ascribed it to the prince: the ascending gentleman was swearing like a trooper.

It was a grim story, one of those grim and poignant dramas which are so often played out unseen, almost mysterious, under the heavy sky of Petersburg, in the dark secret corners of the vast city, in the midst of the giddy ferment of life, of dull egoism, of clashing interests, of gloomy vice and secret crimes, in that seething hell of a senseless and abnormal life_ _

I was startled. The plot of a whole drama seemed to flash before my eyes.That poor woman dying in a cellar at the coffin-maker’s, her orphan child occasionally visiting the old grandfather who had cursed her mother, the queer crazed old man dying in the confectioner’s shop after his dog had died.

It often happens to me that I go and open a book to look up something, and become engrossed in my reading to the exclusion of everything else.

They’d scold me, but I’d say nothing on purpose. They’d beat me, but I wouldn’t speak, I wouldn’t speak. Let them beat me— I wouldn’t cry for anything. They’d be sick with anger because I wasn’t crying.

She was very hot-tempered.

The vivid rosy beams of early sunrise were already playing on the wall.

... and I’m utterly at a loss to fathom— tell me, ask your own heart, will she be happy in that marriage? Reproaches and humiliations, with a mere boy for a life partner who is weary of her love already, and who will begin to neglect her, insult her, and humiliate her as soon as he marries her; the strength of her passion unabating while his grows cooler; jealousy, tortures, hell, divorce, perhaps crime itself....