And the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life.

MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?TOOZENBACH: Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.

For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.

"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."