* * * * *
The best men leave the villages for the towns, and therefore the
villages decline and will continue to decline.
* * * * *
Pavel was a cook for forty years; he loathed the things which he
cooked and he never ate.
* * * * *
He ceased to love a woman; the sensation of not being in love; a
peaceful state of mind; long peaceful thoughts.
* * * * *
Conservative people do so little harm because they are timid and have
no confidence in themselves; harm is done not by conservative but by
malicious people.
* * * * *
One of two things: either sit in the carriage or get out of it.
* * * * *
For a play: an old woman of radical views dresses like a girl, smokes,
cannot exist without company, sympathetic.
* * * * *
In a Pullman car--these are the dregs of society.
* * * * *
On the lady's bosom was the portrait of a fat German.
* * * * *
A man who at all elections all his life long always voted against the
Left.
* * * * *
They undressed the corpse, but had no time to take the gloves off; a
corpse in gloves.
* * * * *
A farmer at dinner boasts: "Life in the country is cheap--one has
one's own chickens, one's own pigs--life is cheap."
* * * * *
A customs official, from want of love for his work, searches the
passengers, looking for documents of a suspicious political nature,
and makes even the gendarmes indignant.
* * * * *
A real male (mouzhtchina) consists of man (mouzh) and title (tchin).
* * * * *
Education: "Masticate your food properly," their father told them. And
they masticated properly, and walked two hours every day, and washed
in cold water, and yet they turned out unhappy and without talent.
* * * * *
Commercial and industrial medicine.
* * * * *
N. forty years old married a girl seventeen. The first night, when
they returned to his mining village, she went to bed and suddenly
burst into tears, because she did not love him. He is a good soul, is
overwhelmed with distress, and goes off to sleep in his little working
room.
* * * * *
On the spot where the former manor house stood there is no trace left;
only one lilac bush remains and that for some reason does not bloom.
* * * * *