It is dreadful that one cannot tear our the past by the roots. We cannot tear it out but we can hide the memory of it.

He had but to call to mind what he had been three months before and what he was now. To call to mind with what regularity he had been going downhill for every possibility of hope to be shattered.

It occurred to him that he had not spent his life as he should have done. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.

...except life's usual answer to the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: live in the needs of the day, that is find forgetfulness.

Тихая, уединенная жизнь в нашей деревенской глуши, с возможностью делать добро людям, которым так легко делать добро, к которому они не привыкли; потом труд, – труд, который, кажется, что приносит пользу; потом отдых, природа, книга, музыка, любовь к близкому человеку, – вот мое счастье, выше которого я не мечтал.