Ward No. 6 And Other Stories Quotes
"In this world everything is insignificant and boring except the higher spiritual manifestations of the human intellect." - Dr. Andrey Yefimych Ragin
"We become ill and suffer hardship because we don’t pray enough to all-merciful God." - Sergey Sergeich
"He knows that at the very moment his thoughts are whirling around the sun with the frozen earth, men are lying tormented by illness and physical filth in the huge block next to his lodgings." - Dr. Andrey Yefimych Ragin
"True, we do have our books, but all that’s poles apart from living conversation and personal contact." - Dr. Andrey Yefimych Ragin
"And why stop people dying if death was the normal, rightful end of everyone? What does it matter if some huckster or bureaucrat lives an extra five or ten years?" - Dr. Andrey Yefimych Ragin
"He knows that behind the barred windows in Ward No. 6 Nikita beats the patients with his fists and that every day Moses goes begging in the streets."
"Life is a vicious trap. When a thinking person reaches manhood and his consciousness has matured, he cannot help thinking that he’s caught in a snare, as it were, from which there’s no escape." - Dr. Andrey Yefimych Ragin
"Every person who passed the window or entered the yard was a spy or detective." - Ivan Dmitrich Gromov
"We idolize women too much and make demands out of all proportion to what we should expect in reality."
"Women will forgive you if you're rude and insolent, but they'll never forgive you for being so stodgy!"
"A man should get carried away, do mad things, make mistakes, suffer!"
"We're so intellectual, so self-important, that we can only utter eternal verities and decide problems of the highest order."
"You can see for yourself that she's at an age when she needs a husband or a lover."
"You're young, handsome, interesting – in short, a terrific chap, yet you live like a monk."
"Revulsion for the animal instinct has been nurtured for hundreds of centuries in hundreds of generations."
"The absence of anything moral and romantic about love is nowadays considered an atavistic phenomenon."
"Every embrace is inspired by a pure impulse of the heart and by respect for women."
"It's better to suffer than to try and console yourself with the thought that women are women and men are men."
"Having reluctantly dragged myself from one resort to another, I became even more convinced of the uncomfortable, mean lives led by the rich and overfed, of how dull and sluggish their imagination was, how narrow their tastes and desires."
"Isn’t Auntie a scream! We had a little tiff and she’s gone off to Merano. What do you think of that?"
"Having sex is easy. All you need do is undress the woman. But it’s what comes afterwards that’s such a drag, such a load of nonsense!"
"I’m contented, Tanya. I’m more than contented, I’m happy! Tanya, dear Tanya, you’re such a likeable person! Dear Tanya, I’m so glad, so glad!"
"Don’t be afraid, Andrey. Don’t be afraid… Papa, it will pass… it will pass…"
"You’re ill from overworking, you’ve worn yourself out. I’m trying to say that you’ve sacrificed your health for an idea and it won’t be long before you sacrifice your very life to it. What could be better?"
"I just can’t understand, I really can’t! Something incomprehensible and horrible is going on in this house. You’ve changed, you’re not your normal self."
"I congratulate you – since Friday I’ve put on another pound."
"Father has just died. I owe that to you, as you killed him. Our garden is going to rack and ruin – strangers are running it – that’s to say, what poor father feared so much has come about."
"I must say, I don’t like that cousin of mine. He’s a proud, stern man, always swearing and tormenting the life out of his relatives and workmen, and he doesn’t go to confession."
"Time was when I waited on counts and princes, but now I don’t know how to serve tea, do you see? Swearing at me in front of a priest and ladies!"
"I don’t like the spring, it’s very muddy. In books they write about the spring, birds singing and the sun setting, but what’s so nice about it? A bird’s a bird, that’s all."
"I could lend you fifteen hundred roubles. Won’t do any good telling anyone, no good at all… We can’t bring him back from the dead anyway."
"I should give him the fifteen hundred! But the idea struck her as rather absurd, and insulting to Pimenov."
"When the staff were ready to leave, Anna Akimovna offered Pimenov her hand and wanted to ask him to visit her some time, but her tongue would not obey her and she could not produce one word."
"‘There’s really a great deal of cruelty about these festivities’, she said aloud to herself."
"‘Misha, you always talk such boring stuff that it’s impossible to understand you’, Anna Akimovna said."
"Anna Akimovna knew that there was no work for him at the factory, but could not bring herself to dismiss him – she did not have the courage, and, what was more, had grown used to him."
"Anna Akimovna thumped her fist on the table. ‘To continue living as I do now, to marry someone as idle, feckless as myself would be criminal. I can’t go on living like this’, she said furiously, ‘I just can’t!’"
"‘Let me have my say!’ she exclaimed. ‘Personally, I don’t recognize love without the family.'"
"‘Sophia, don’t play the fool’, she drawled; ‘it’s really so stupid.’"
"‘If only I could fall in love’, she thought, stretching herself, and this thought alone warmed her heart."
"‘That’s terrible, really terrible!’ he whispered jealously. ‘That’s terrible!’"
"‘But what on earth for?’ Nina Fyodorovna said anxiously. ‘It’s really enough for me, those two hundred and fifty roubles I get every month from you and our brother. God bless you’, she added in a soft voice, so that the servants wouldn’t hear."
"I know, but it’s you I’ve come to see, not him."
"Without work, life can never be honest and happy."
"She wondered if she had behaved badly in refusing a man just because she didn’t care for his looks."
"Wouldn’t the same thing happen to her? Shouldn’t she enter a convent or become a nurse?"
"I was afraid of spoiling your life and mine."
"She felt that there was much that was feminine and childlike about his face, features and expression."
"A feeling of youthfulness, health, strength – he was only twenty-two – and an inexpressibly sweet anticipation of happiness, of a mysterious unfamiliar happiness, gradually took possession of him. And life seemed entrancing, wonderful and endowed with sublime meaning."
"The past is linked to the present by an unbroken chain of events, each flowing from the other."
"He felt that he had just witnessed both ends of this chain. When he touched one end, the other started shaking."
"Truth and beauty, which had guided human life there in the garden and the High Priest’s palace and had continued unbroken to the present, were the most important parts of the life of man, and of the whole of terrestrial life."
"I can imagine that quiet, terribly dark garden, those dull sobs, barely audible in the silence…"
"It was on a cold night like this that the Apostle Peter warmed himself by a fire."
"The old woman had wept, but not at his moving narrative: it was because Peter was close to her and because she was concerned, from the bottom of her heart, with his most intimate feelings."
"He loved Jesus passionately, to distraction, and now, from afar, he could see them beating him."
"I suppose you were at the Twelve Readings from the Gospels yesterday?"