Short Fiction quotes

“Our losses insignificant; officers, wounded, so many, giving names; rank and file, killed, 50; wounded, 100,” and even rejoice that the numbers are so small; but to me the reading of such news immediately brings the whole bloody picture before my eyes.

Fifty dead, one hundred maimed⁠—this is “insignificant!”

Why are we so horrified when the newspapers inform us of some murder where the victims are few?

but to me the reading of such news immediately brings the whole bloody picture before my eyes. Fifty dead, one hundred maimed—this is “insignificant!” Why are we so horrified when the newspapers inform us of some murder where the victims are few?

Why does not the sight of corpses riddled with bullets lying on a battlefield strike us with the same horror as the interior of a house ransacked by murder?

Why does a catastrophe costing the lives of some scores of persons cause all Russia to cry out, whilst nobody pays any attention to advanced-guard skirmishes with “insignificant” losses, also of some scores of men?

But now I see my whole building of tranquillity destroyed, and I see myself automatically fitting on to my shoulders those same tatters, holes, and stains which I have hitherto only looked at.

And no kind of development, no self-knowledge, no knowledge of the world, no kind of spiritual liberty will give me a pitiful physical liberty⁠—the liberty to dispose of my own body.

Lvoff laughs when I begin to expound my views against the war to him.

They tell me something about Skobeloff: that he hurled himself at some place, attacked something, took some fort, or they have taken it from him—I do not remember.

In this awful affair I understand and see only one thing⁠—a mountain of corpses serving as a pedestal for grandiose matters which will be inscribed on the pages of history.

Perhaps it is necessary—I will not take it upon myself to judge, and I cannot. I am not arguing about the war, but regard it with a direct feeling aroused by the wholesale shedding of blood.

Always fresh battles, fresh mortal suffering. After reading the papers I can do nothing. In books, instead of letters, I see prostrate rows of human beings.

My pen seems a weapon inflicting black wounds on the white paper.

If this goes much further it will become regular hallucinations. But now a new trouble has appeared which has somewhat taken me away from the everlasting oppressing thought.

Always fresh battles, fresh mortal suffering. After reading the papers I can do nothing.

In books, instead of letters, I see prostrate rows of human beings.

My pen seems a weapon inflicting black wounds on the white paper. If this goes much further it will become regular hallucinations. But now a new trouble has appeared which has somewhat taken me away from the everlasting oppressing thought.

Perhaps this seems ridiculous to you, but the thought is a constant torture to me now that if I had loved him—we should have lived quite differently. All would have happened differently, and this awful and stupid business would not have happened.

One thinks and thinks, excuses and justifies oneself, but all the time at the bottom of one’s mind something keeps saying⁠—Your fault, your fault, your fault!

”

There will be war, and if you do not go to fight they will take someone else, and, anyhow—mankind will be mutilated or tortured by its course. I am afraid you do not understand me, as I express myself badly. Listen!

In my idea war is a common sorrow, a common suffering, and to avoid it is perhaps permissible, only such a course is not pleasing to me.

”

Well, it is all the same. It is all over.

Now I do not belong to myself. I shall go with the stream.

Now it is best not to think and not to judge, but to accept without criticism all the chances of life, and only cry out when in pain. …

… The conversation was only of the past, no one referred to the future, to those hard times, dangers, and sufferings which awaited us all.

No one took any interest in the Turks or Bulgars, or troubled himself about the question for which he was perhaps going to die.

A drunken young recruit of a local contingent, passing us, stopped at our group, and when I again began to talk of the war authoritatively said:

For a whole month I have not touched them. For the last time I take the half-finished work into my hands. It has stopped short and lies dead, incomplete, senseless.

Instead of finishing it I am going with thousands of others to the brink of the world because history has need of my physical strength.

As for intellectual forces—forget about them. No one wants them. Of what benefit have been the many years I have studied them and prepared myself to apply them?

“Don’t you be alarmed. I shall not run away,” quietly replied the Barin. “

You cannot get away from a bullet.

”

The wild, maddened, hoarse cries are wrung from me, but there is no answer. Loudly they resound in the night air, but everything else remains silent. Only the grasshoppers keep up their chirruping.

The moon is looking down at me with a pitying gaze.

If he was somebody wounded my shouts would have roused him. It is a corpse. One of us or a Turk? But is it not all the same? And sleep is closing my fevered eyelids.

There will be just a few lines in the newspapers that our losses were insignificant:—wounded … so many; killed—one, Private Ivanoff—no, the names of the men are not given, they simply say killed … one.

One private, as if it were one dog.

All the details of an incident which happened long ago flash to my mind. By the way, how long ago all my life seems—I mean that life when I was not lying here with my legs shot through. …

No … you will lie here and die. And how good is life! How happy I was that day! I went along as if intoxicated. Recollections! do not torture me! Leave me alone with this present torture, then at least I cannot involuntarily make comparisons.

Oh, this longing for home! It is worse than wounds.

However, it is getting hot. The sun is scorching me. I open my eyes and see the same bushes, the same sky, only by daylight … and there is my neighbour. Yes, he is a Turk, a corpse. What a huge man!

I did not want to do it. I wished no one harm when I volunteered.

It somehow never entered my mind that I should have to kill people.

I only thought of how I would expose my own breast to the bullets. I came … and now … fool! fool!

then in the majority of cases, with an air of concern, they begin to ask, “Is it impossible for you to give up such a life?” At first this kind of thing used to upset me, but now I am accustomed to it.

One becomes accustomed to a lot.

However, for the last fortnight, whenever I am quite alone and am not feeling gay—that is, not drunk (because can I really be merry except when drunk?)—I begin to think. And, however much I do not wish to think, I cannot help it.

My temples are throbbing, there is a ringing in my ears, everything is swimming in my head, and I am being carried away.

I want to stop, to take hold of something, if only a straw, but there is nothing, not even a straw.

I lie! There is one! And not a straw, but something perhaps more hopeful. But I have sunk so low that I do not wish to stretch out my hand to seize this support.

She answers him, turns round, and goes with him … and I after them.

If the road were strewn with sharp nails it could not be more painful for me.

I go along hearing nothing, seeing nothing, except two figures. …

All these sounds rang in my ears, but I paid no attention to them or to the frost, which was biting my face and my benumbed legs. All this, the sounds, my feet, and the frost, seemed to be all far, far away from me.

My legs were aching violently, but something inside me was aching even more violently.

I have not the courage to go to her. Does she know that there is a man who would consider it happiness to sit with her in a room, and only look into her eyes, not even touching her hands?

But I think it is still too soon. I am too young, I feel too much that I am alive.

I want to live, to breathe, to feel, hear, see.

I want to be able, even if rarely, to see the sky and the Neva.

On the one side enormous buildings, and on the other—the blackening, icebound Neva. The ice will soon move, and then the river will be blue. The park on the opposite side is becoming green. The islands, too, are becoming covered with foliage.

Although it is a Petersburg spring, still, it is spring.

And suddenly I remembered my last happy spring. I was then a girl of seven years, and lived with my father and mother in the country in the steppe.

And I really cried. I cried long and bitterly. They have assured me since babyhood that one feels easier after crying, but this cannot be true for all, because I do not feel easier, but worse.

Every sob hurts me, every tear is a bitter one.

To those who have still some hope of peace and of being cured such tears perhaps give relief; but what hope have I?

“Ding-dong, ding-dong!” The chimes again ring out their doleful chant, and then one o’clock strikes. Only one o’clock!

Still seven hours before daylight, then this black winter night, with its cold, wet snow, will give place to a grey day.

Shall I go home? I do not know. It is absolutely all the same to me. I have no need of sleep.

Now the grandmother is dead. This year many have died, and not only old grandmothers. I could have died very easily, I assure you. But I have not.

Oh, how much trouble can a man stand? You do not know, and neither do I.

Very well, Masha ordered me to be a hero, and therefore I had to join the army.

a doctor in white apron with blood-covered hands; hospital nurses; my leg, with its birthmark, taken off below the knee. All this happened as in a dream. Then the ambulance-train, with its comfortable cots and dainty lady in charge, brought me to St. Petersburg.

When you leave a town in the usual and proper way with two legs, and return to it with one leg and a stump instead of the other⁠—believe me, it costs something.

They placed me in a hospital. This was in July. I begged them to find out the address of Mary Ivanovna and the good-natured attendant brought it me.

It will pass away. You will grow accustomed to it. You will look at it and will say, ‘What a simpleton I am!’ Yes, you will say it, remember my words! Come along, let us go and have a drink and forget about erring engineers.

That’s why a man has brains, in order to go astray.

… Well, my dear tutor, how much are you going to get?”

“It is a long way to Siberia, my friend. You are an extraordinary man; you don’t understand in the least. Am I really the only one who … to put it more politely … ‘acquires’?

All around, even the air seems to pilfer.

Not long ago a fresh hand appeared and began to write about honesty. What happened? We protected ourselves. … And always will protect ourselves. All for one, one for all. Do you imagine that man is his own enemy?

“That’s stupid.

People change, and I have changed, but in what direction⁠—you could not guess.

You are not a prophet.”

“

There is power in money, and I have money. I do what I like.

… If I wish to buy you—I shall buy you.”

… of my heart and the ticking of the watch—only now I perceive that all these sorrows, joys, and triumphs which go to make up life—all are unrealities, for some of which I have striven, and from others have fled without, in either case, knowing why.

I did not know then that life holds only one reality⁠—time.

Time marching forward, passionless, pitiless, not halting where hapless man, living by minutes, would fain dwell, and not increasing its pace by one iota, even when reality is so grievous that it is desirable to make it a past dream;

I have lied, and deceived, and deluded even myself. Just as a swindler borrows money right and left, deceiving people with fictitious stories of his wealth—of wealth he has never received, but nevertheless declares to exist—so I all my life have lied to myself.

Now the day of reckoning has arrived, and I am bankrupt⁠—a fraudulent bankrupt.

”

He had arrived at such a state that he could not even say of himself, “I am myself.”

In his soul voices were speaking. They were speaking differently, and which of these voices was his own, his “ego,” he himself could not tell.

The first voice, full and clear, flayed him with well-defined, even eloquent, phrases. The second voice, vague but quarrelsome and persistent, sometimes drowned the first: “Why condemn yourself?” it said. “Better deceive yourself to the end; deceive all.

He allowed you to read anything, because only good could remain in the mind of his adored little boy. And you read and read, understanding nothing of the arguments, but, nevertheless, taking it all in accordance with childish ideas.

Yes, red was red then, and not the reflection of red rays. Then everything was as it appeared.

Then there were not ready-made receptacles for impressions, for ideas into which a man poured forth all that he felt, not troubling whether the receptacle was a fit one or sound. And if he loved someone, he knew without a doubt that he loved.

Then everything was as it appeared. Then there were not ready-made receptacles for impressions, for ideas into which a man poured forth all that he felt, not troubling whether the receptacle was a fit one or sound.

And if he loved someone, he knew without a doubt that he loved.

A pretty, laughing face rose before his eyes and vanished.

“Yes, then I cried,” murmured Alexei Petrovich, rising from the armchair and commencing to pace the room. “Then I cried.”

He became dreadfully sorry for these tears of a sixteen-year-old boy, sorry for that time when he could cry because a defenceless human being was struck in his presence.

The frosty air was all this time entering the window. A cloud of steam was literally pouring into the already cold room.

He wished now, if only for one minute, to take himself back to his childhood, to the village, to the little house, and to caress this “crushed” man, caress him in regular childish fashion.

He longed for that clean and simple love which only children know, and possibly the very clean, unspoiled natures of a few older people.

“And is it really impossible to return to this happiness? To this ability to recognize that what one says and thinks is true? How many years it is since I experienced it!

Yet one more apparently senseless phrase took shape in the head of Alexei Petrovich.

“Do you really think what you are thinking?”

It was a senseless phrase, but he understood it.

“Do I know what these words mean ‘Become as a little child?’

It means not to place oneself first in everything, to tear from one’s heart this horrid little deformed god with its protuberant paunch, this repulsive ‘ego’ which, like some cankerworm, sucks dry the soul, and ceaselessly demands of it fresh food.

But out of where shall I tear it? Thou hast already devoured all. All my time, all my forces, have been devoted to thy service. I have nourished thee, have revered thee.

But these efforts were of little avail. They needed space, their homeland and freedom. They were natives of hot climes, tender, luxurious creations. They remembered with longing the lands of their birth.

However transparent the glass roof it was not the clear heavens.

Occasionally in wintertime the panes became frosted, and then the greenhouse became quite dark. The wind would howl and beat against the iron framework, causing it to vibrate. The roof would be covered with drift-snow.

replied Attalea. “Now I know what to do. I shall leave you all alone. Live how you like, growl at each other, argue about sips of water, and stay forever under a glass dome. I alone will find a way for myself.

I want to see the sky and sun direct, not through this glass and grating⁠ ⁠… and I will.

”

“Painful?

What does it matter whether it is painful or not when I wish to gain my freedom?

Did not you yourself encourage me?” replied the palm.

“But who is speaking of masterpieces of creation, Peter Nicolaievitch?

If only they would recognize him as a man.

”

Their spiritual world could not be disturbed by bleeding feet, insufferable heat, and deadly tiredness.

Never have I experienced such complete spiritual calm, such peace within myself, and such contentment with life as when I was undergoing these hardships, and went forward under a rain of bullets to kill people.

All this may seem wild and strange, but I am only writing the truth.

Bloodthirsty instincts are not awakened; there is no desire to go ahead in order to kill somebody. But there is an irresistible force which drives one forward at all costs. Thoughts as to what must be done during action cannot be expressed in words.

It is necessary to kill, or rather⁠—one’s duty to die.

Whilst we were crossing the valley the Turks succeeded in firing several shots. As we slowly climbed up to the village we were separated from the Turks only by the last piece of thick undergrowth. As we entered the bushes everything became quiet.

The gathering was politely, but quite excitedly, debating some question.

As was proper, no one agreed with the other, as each highly prized the independence of his opinion and character.

“In my opinion,” said the beetle, “a properly conducted animal should first and before all busy himself about his posterity. Life is labour for the future generation. He who wittingly carries out the obligations laid upon him by Nature stands upon sure ground.

I have now been four days crawling on this plant, and I have not finished yet. And after this burdock is finished there is another, and in it I am sure a snail is sitting. And that’s all.

To jump is not necessary⁠—that is all imagination and frivolity; sit and eat the leaf on which you are resting.

If I had not been lazy in crawling I should long ago have gone away from you and your arguments. One’s head aches from them, and nothing more.”

The bay, lizard, and snail did not know this, but the insects had a kind of glimmering knowledge on the subject. And all kept silent for a short time, because no one knew how to say anything to the point respecting the future life.

“It is necessary to treat strong convictions with respect,” chirruped the grasshopper at length.

“Does no one wish to say anything more? Perhaps you ladies?” and he turned to the flies. The elder of them answered:

First from some distant pond would come the solemn reverberating chorus of frogs, then the regular but hurried chirrup of the grasshopper and the cry of the quail.

Again, faint, indistinguishable harmonious sounds would be wafted to our ears⁠—mayhap the sound of some distant bell borne on the breeze, or the voice of Nature, whose tongue we do not understand.

But in the encampment all is becoming quiet. Gradually fires are extinguished. The bears under the carts to which they are tethered growl deeply from time to time, as with a jingling of their chains they restlessly change their position.

“Come along,” says my father. Vasia bravely starts, and the droshky wends its way along the winding road below into the valley.

A thin dust rises half-heartedly from under the wheels, and then, as if also overcome with sleep, falls back on to the dewy grass.

“Papa, does anyone know gipsy?”

There was no trace of insanity in its features now. It was the deep, heavy sleep of an exhausted being, dreamless, motionless, and almost breathless.

For a few seconds he awoke, fully conscious, and apparently sane, only to rise in the morning from his bed again bereft of reason.

“How do you feel?” asked the doctor of him the following morning.

He did not know in what the task would consist, but felt himself possessed of sufficient strength to execute it. He could read the thoughts of others. He saw in things their whole history.

The large elms in the Asylum garden revealed whole legends of the past to him.

The building, which really was of old construction, he considered a structure of Peter the Great, and was convinced that that Tsar had lived in it at the time of the Poltava battle.

“Soon, soon the iron bars will fall asunder; all these prisoners will issue hence, and will flash to all ends of the earth.

The whole world will tremble, will divest itself of its ancient covering, and will appear in new and wondrous beauty.

” He had almost forgotten the blossoms, but, on leaving the garden and mounting the flight of steps, he again saw them in the thick grass which had already become covered with dew, whereupon, keeping back from the rest of the patients, he awaited a …

But all around was so beautiful, so clean and bright on this glorious morning when the rose first saw the blue sky and felt the caress of the morning zephyr, and the rays of a brilliant sun, giving a pinkish tint to its thin petals.

All in the flowerbed was so peaceful and calm that had the rose really been able to cry, it would not have been from grief, but from the very joy of living.

It could not talk; it could only diffuse around, with lowered head, a delicate fresh perfume, and this perfume was at once its words, tears, and prayers.

All in the flowerbed was so peaceful and calm that had the rose really been able to cry, it would not have been from grief, but from the very joy of living.

It could not talk; it could only diffuse around, with lowered head, a delicate fresh perfume, and this perfume was at once its words, tears, and prayers.

But below it, amongst the roots of the rosebush on the damp soil, as if glued to it by its flat belly, there sat a decidedly fat old toad, which used to hunt all night for worms and midges, and when morning came, would sit …

I cannot rid myself of these recollections, and a strange thought has come into my head.

Perhaps if I commit these recollections to paper I shall in this way settle accounts and finish with them.

… Perhaps they will leave me, and allow me to die in peace. This is the strange reason which is compelling me to take up a pen. Perhaps somebody will read this diary, perhaps not; I care little.

Yes, I had talent. And I say this not because of the criticisms of comrades and experts, not because I passed so quickly through the Academy, but because of the feeling which was in me, which made itself felt every time I commenced to work.

No one who is not an artist can experience the painful but delicious excitement every time one approaches a new canvas for the first time.

No one but an artist can experience the oblivion to all around when the soul is engrossed in. … Yes, I had talent, and I should have become no ordinary artist.

I read over and over again all that I could get hold of about her, studied her portraits, and decided to paint a picture.

The first picture, like a first love, takes entire possession of one.

I carried about mentally the figure which I had formed; I thought out the minutest details, and reached such a stage that, by closing my eyes, I could clearly see the Charlotte I had decided to put to canvas.

“I have often argued with you about this, Serge Vassilivich, and apparently you will never convince me, nor I you.

An artist is an artist precisely because he can place himself in another’s place.

Was it necessary for Raphael to become the Blessed Virgin in order to paint the Madonna? It is absurd. Serge Vassilivich. However, I am beginning an argument, although I have said I don’t wish to argue with you.”

“Yes, and I envy you because you have a fiancée,” he repeated, not listening to me. “

I envy you your cleanness, your expectations, your future happiness, your stock of as yet untouched love.

”

“Follow our noses … Come with me. I will take you to a place.

Nature in a silly humour frightens me. Better to go and look at human folly.

”

“A long time—longer than I have.

He is a man whose brain is nothing but compartments and drawers. He will open one, take out a ticket, read what is on it, and act in accordance.

That is the way in which he saw this case. He sees a fallen woman, and immediately he refers to his brain (the compartments are alphabetically arranged), opens the drawer, and reads: ‘They never return.’ ”

… It is only necessary to find out where she lives. Then I will talk with her … and now I will leave all this and go on with my work.

In the empty and colourless grinding mill we call life there is only one real absolute happiness⁠—the satisfaction of the worker when buried in his labours.

He forgets all the trivialities of life, and then, having completed his task, can say to himself with pride: “Yes, today I have done something beneficial and of use.”

“Because it is a serious subject—a matter of life, Andrei.

Do you think that only tall people with straight backs and chests can think out serious subjects?

Oh, you conceited hop-poles! Believe me,” continued he, with an air of assumed importance, “that between these humps of mine great ideas can reside, and in this long box (he struck himself on the head) great ideas are born.”

“Would you not surely do the same?” continued Senichka. “Your picture, surely, is it not the same question? Do you really know if this woman did right?

You will make people think⁠—that’s the whole point.

And, apart from the aesthetic feeling which every picture arouses, and which of itself is not worth much—is not this the idea which animates our work?”

Three years ago everything was possible and easy. I lied in this very diary when I wrote that I gave her up because I saw it was impossible to save her. Or, if I did not lie, I deceived myself.

It would have been easy to save her. It only meant bending down to pick her up, but I would not stoop.

I understand this only now, when my heart is aching with love for her. Love! No, it is not love; it is more: it is a raging passion, a fire which is consuming me. How shall I extinguish it?

When I awoke the sun was already high up. The heat was like yesterday’s. A battalion of the Nevsky Regiment which had passed us going in the direction of yesterday’s cannonading marched along, however, quite spiritedly.

The men were infected with the closeness of battle.

However, they soon returned, and, skirting the village, probably made for the scene of the previous day’s rifle-firing. Today it was less distinct, the shots were further from us.

I lay on my back and gazed through the branches at the darkening sky. The giant trunks, which would have required some half-dozen men to span their girth, had shot up and thrown out branches which had interlaced with each other.

Only here and there could there be seen a little star in the now blue-black sky, and far, far away they seemed, as if in the depth of some abyss from which they were peacefully grazing.

The booming of guns continued, and the tops of the trees momentarily reflected the red glare which appeared immediately before each report, making them look even more terrible and dismal. There was no sound of rifle-fire.

It was quite true, the bullets were already spent, as can always be told by their sound.

A bullet when fired at close range squeals and whistles, but when it “comes to die” merely hisses like a snake.

The bullets continued to fly around us. The company kept silent. The tense feeling which involuntarily showed itself at the sound of these heralds of death relaxed. All began to imagine that the bullets were merely flying over us or dropping harmlessly to earth.

The Turkish sharpshooters were about eight hundred paces from us, so that our rifles scarcely did them much harm. Moreover, a whole row of Turkish guns were in position from twelve hundred to fifteen hundred paces from us, and raining shell on our weak firing-line.

Although bullets cause many more deaths and wounds, yet shells have a far greater moral effect.

I lay, firing at intervals, and every now and then consulting Paul Ignatich (our corporal) as to the sights and whether it would not be better to fire on chance at the artillery. The bullets began to whistle amongst us oftener and oftener.

The drizzle damped her striped polished back, and the raindrops trickled down under her belly behind her paws, which was extraordinarily pleasant—so pleasant that she almost gave a croak.

But luckily she remembered that it was already autumn, and that frogs don’t croak in the autumn⁠—the spring is the time for that⁠—and had she croaked she might have lost her “frogly” dignity.

So she kept quiet and continued to take her ease.