Three Sisters quotes

Ivan Romanovitch, dear Ivan Romanovitch!

I feel as if I were sailing under the broad blue sky with great white birds around me.

Why is that? Why?

How fine it is to be a workman who gets up at daybreak and breaks stones in the street, or a shepherd, or a schoolmaster, who teaches children, or an engine-driver on the railway. …

My God, let alone a man, it’s better to be an ox, or just a horse, so long as it can work, than a young woman who wakes up at twelve o’clock, has her coffee in bed, and then spends two hours dressing.

… Oh it’s awful! Sometimes when it’s hot, your thirst can be just as tiresome as my need for work. And if I don’t get up early in future and work, Ivan Romanovitch, then you may refuse me your friendship.

They shielded me from work; but only just in time!

A new age is dawning, the people are marching on us all, a powerful, health-giving storm is gathering, it is drawing near, soon it will be upon us and it will drive away laziness, indifference, the prejudice against labour, and rotten dullness from our society.

I shall work, and in twenty-five or thirty years, every man will have to work. Everyone!

I shan’t work.

In twenty-five years’ time, we shall all be dead, thank the Lord.

In two or three years’ time apoplexy will carry you off, or else I’ll blow your brains out, my pet. Takes a scent-bottle out of his pocket and sprinkles his chest and hands.

Yes, when they used to call me the lovelorn Major,

I was young and in love. I’ve grown out of both now.

But you haven’t a single white hair yet. You’re older, but you’re not yet old.

I know why. All look at him.

Because if it was near it wouldn’t be far off, and if it’s far off, it can’t be near.

An awkward pause.

Mother is buried in Moscow.

Do you know, I’m beginning to forget her face. We’ll be forgotten in just the same way.

Yes, they’ll forget us. It’s our fate, it can’t be helped. A time will come when everything that seems serious, significant, or very important to us will be forgotten, or considered trivial. Pause.

Yes, they’ll forget us. It’s our fate, it can’t be helped.

A time will come when everything that seems serious, significant, or very important to us will be forgotten, or considered trivial.

Pause. And the curious thing is that we can’t possibly find out what will come to be regarded as great and important, and what will be feeble, or silly.

Goes up behind Andrey and takes him round the waist with both arms.

Nature only brought us into the world that we should love!

Roars with laughter, then sits down and reads a newspaper which he takes out of his pocket.

Thanks to father, my sisters and I know French, German, and English, and Irina knows Italian as well. But we paid dearly for it all!

A knowledge of three languages is an unnecessary luxury in this town. It isn’t even a luxury but a sort of useless extra, like a sixth finger. We know a lot too much.

Well, I say! Laughs. You know a lot too much! I don’t think there can really be a town so dull and stupid as to have no place for a clever, cultured person.

Walks about the stage. I often wonder: suppose we could begin life over again, knowing what we were doing?

Suppose we could use one life, already ended, as a sort of rough draft for another?

I think that every one of us would try, more than anything else, not to repeat himself, at the very least he would rearrange his manner of life, he would make sure of rooms like these, with flowers and light … I have a wife …

And then let me offer you this book as a present. Gives it to her. It is the history of our high school during the last fifty years, written by myself.

The book is worthless, and written because I had nothing to do, but read it all the same.

Good day, gentlemen! To Vershinin. My name is Kuligin, I am a master of the local high school. To Irina. In this book you will find a list of all those who have taken the full course at our high school during these fifty years.

Bows. I seem to have dropped in on your name day. Forgive me, I didn’t know, and I didn’t offer you my congratulations. Goes with Olga into the dining-room.

Today is Sunday, the day of rest, so let us rest and rejoice, each in a manner compatible with his age and disposition.

The carpets will have to be taken up for the summer and put away till the winter … Persian powder or naphthaline. … The Romans were healthy because they knew both how to work and how to rest, they had mens sana in corpore sano.

Raps with her fork on a plate.

Let’s all get drunk and make life purple for once!

You’ve lost three good conduct marks.

Nothing. Looks through the book. Tomorrow’s Friday. I’m not supposed to go to work, but I’ll come—all the same … and do some work. It’s dull at home. Pause.

Oh, my dear old man, how strangely life changes, and how it deceives!

Today, out of sheer boredom, I took up this book—old university lectures, and I couldn’t help laughing.

After a pause.

No. God did not lead me there.

Pause. Shall I go?

It’s all the same! If you listen to a member of the local intelligentsia, whether to civilian or military, he will tell you that he’s sick of his wife, sick of his house, sick of his estate, sick of his horses. …

We Russians are extremely gifted in the direction of thinking on an exalted plane, but, tell me, why do we aim so low in real life?

Why?

I don’t know. I want some tea.

Half my life for a tumbler of tea: I haven’t had anything since morning.

What is it?

Well?

After our time people will fly about in balloons, the cut of one’s coat will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and develop it, but life will remain the same, laborious, mysterious, and happy.

And in a thousand years’ time, people will still be sighing: “Life is hard!”—and at the same time they’ll be just as afraid of death, and unwilling to meet it, as we are.

Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains forever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out.

Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where.

They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly. …

It seems to me that a man must have faith, or must search for a faith, or his life will be empty, empty. …

To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why babies are born, why there are stars in the sky.

… Either you must know why you live, or everything is trivial, not worth a straw. A pause.

… To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why babies are born, why there are stars in the sky. …

Either you must know why you live, or everything is trivial, not worth a straw.

A pause.

Now, of course, that he is at liberty, he notices birds no more than he did before. When you go to live in Moscow you’ll not notice it, in just the same way.

There can be no happiness for us, it only exists in our wishes.

Takes cardboard box from the table. Where are the pastries?

So there I am, in my loneliness.

Say what you will, loneliness is a terrible thing, old fellow.

… Though really … of course, it absolutely doesn’t matter!

Alone in her misery.

To Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!

Devil take it. Last Wednesday I attended a woman in Zasip—and she died, and it’s my fault that she died. Yes … I used to know a certain amount five-and-twenty years ago, but I don’t remember anything now. Nothing.

Perhaps I’m not really a man, and am only pretending that I’ve got arms and legs and a head; perhaps I don’t exist at all, and only imagine that I walk, and eat, and sleep.

Cries. Oh, if only I didn’t exist! Stops crying; angrily. The devil only knows. … Day before yesterday they were talking in the club;

Perhaps. … To your mother, your mother. Perhaps I didn’t break it; it only looks as if I broke it.

Perhaps we only think that we exist, when really we don’t. I don’t know anything, nobody knows anything.

At the door. What are you looking at? Natasha has a little romance with Protopopov, and you don’t see it. … There you sit and see nothing, and Natasha has a little romance with Protopovov. … Sings. Won’t you please accept this date. … Exit.

Controlling herself. Oh, I am unhappy … I can’t work, I shan’t work. Enough, enough! I used to be a telegraphist, now I work at the town council offices, and I have nothing but hate and contempt for all they give me to do …

I am already twenty-three, I have already been at work for a long while, and my brain has dried up, and I’ve grown thinner, plainer, older, and there is no relief of any sort, and time goes and it seems all the while as if I am going away from the real, the beautiful life, farther and farther away, down some precipice.

I’m in despair and I can’t understand how it is that I am still alive, that I haven’t killed myself.

… And he loves me. … It is all awful. Yes; it isn’t good, is it? Takes Irina’s hand and draws her to her. Oh, my dear. … How are we going to live through our lives, what is to become of us. …

When you read a novel it all seems so old and easy, but when you fall in love yourself, then you learn that nobody knows anything, and each must decide for himself.

… My dear ones, my sisters … I’ve confessed, now I shall keep silence. … Like the lunatics in Gogol’s story, I’m going to be silent … silent …

Is my man here? When our cook Martha used to ask about her gendarme, she used to say my man. Is he here?

When you take your happiness in little bits, in snatches, and then lose it, as I have done, you gradually get coarser, more bitter.

Points to her bosom. I’m boiling in here. … Looks at Andrey with the perambulator. There’s our brother Andrey. … All our hopes in him have gone.

Points to her bosom. I’m boiling in here. … Looks at Andrey with the perambulator. There’s our brother Andrey. … All our hopes in him have gone.

There was once a great bell, a thousand persons were hoisting it, much money and labour had been spent on it, when it suddenly fell and was broken.

Suddenly, for no particular reason. … Andrey is like that. …

It isn’t in my power! I shall be your wife, I shall be true to you, and obedient to you, but I can’t love you. What can I do! Cries. I have never been in love in my life.

Oh, I used to think so much of love, I have been thinking about it for so long by day and by night, but my soul is like an expensive piano which is locked and the key lost.

Pause. You seem so unhappy.

Oh don’t let’s talk about it! I am happy. It is as if for the first time in my life I see these firs, maples, beeches, and they all look at me inquisitively and wait.

What beautiful trees and how beautiful, when one comes to think of it, life must be near them!

A shout of Co-ee! in the distance. It’s time I went. … There’s a tree which has dried up but it still sways in the breeze with the others.

Oh, what has become of my past and where is it? I used to be young, happy, clever, I used to be able to think and frame clever ideas, the present and the future seemed to me full of hope.

Why do we, almost before we have begun to live, become dull, grey, uninteresting, lazy, apathetic, useless, unhappy.

… This town has already been in existence for two hundred years and it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one of whom is in any way different from the others.

Handing him papers. The hall-porter from the law courts was saying just now that in the winter there were two hundred degrees of frost in Petersburg.

The present is beastly, but when I think of the future, how good it is!

I feel so light, so free; there is a light in the distance, I see freedom. I see myself and my children freeing ourselves from vanities, from kvass, from goose baked with cabbage, from after-dinner naps, from base idleness. …