Yama quotes

“Lay folk say a lot of things about nuns … Well, even if there had been sin once in a while …”

“If you don’t sin⁠—you don’t repent,” Zoe puts in seriously, and wets her finger in her mouth.

“You sit and sew, the gold eddies before your eyes, while from standing in the morning at prayer your back just aches, and your legs ache. And at evening there is service again. You knock at the door of the mother superior’s cell:

It was just as though they had forgotten about her, even though they saw her every hour. Tamara alone would drop in occasionally on Magda, perch on her bed, chat with her for ten or fifteen minutes, and go away dissatisfied.

“You’re some sort of an inanimate being, Magda,” she would say. “Neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring. You have huckleberry jelly instead of a soul!”

Emma Edwardovna was faithful to her word: she had betrayed to none the sexual mystery of Magda. But by degrees she, too, became possessed with a serious perplexity.

“And Magda?” asked Anna Markovna.

“Magda is quits. She threw a bomb at the governor. They hanged her.”

“For, after all, one must have the courage to confess that we Russian intelligents, made round-shouldered and prematurely decrepit while yet upon the benches of the gymnasia, are not at all capable either of savage passions or of tempestuous desires!

Ours is not sexual hunger, but a mere whim, an indulgence, a feeble diversion.

But here’s what an eyewitness was telling me about a certain Ingush—or was it an Ossetian—in short, about some fiery Caucasian mountaineer. He had come to Kislovodsk, a rich, fashionable health resort. It was a warm, fragrant, summer evening.

“And that’s all. I would have vindicated this young blockhead. Wherein is any elemental force to blame? But you speak of your needs. Heh! All of us cerebral chaps love with the imagination.

We are onanists, rather than males.

”

Not with the mind, but the heart.

Such a devilish muddle is this life.

Shall we drink some cognac, Likhonin?”

Here is necessary the great ability to take some picayune trifle, an insignificant, paltry little stroke, and then will result a dreadful truth, from which the reader, aghast, will forget that his mouth is agape.

People seek the terrible in words, in cries, in gestures.

Well, now, for example, I am reading a description of some pogrom or of a slaughter in jail, or of a riot being put down.

“There’s a fine fellow, now—I love you for that!” exclaimed Jennie joyously and maliciously, striking her fist on the table.

“You can tell an owl at once by its flight, a good man by his snot!”

Little White Manya and Tamara looked at Jennie with wonder, but, noting the evil little lights leaping in her eyes and her nervously quivering nostrils, they both understood and smiled.

“What’s this stuff?” exclaimed Boris, raising his shoulders high and snorting through his nose. “What eyeglasses? Why eyeglasses?” But mechanically, with two extended fingers, he fixed the bow of the pince-nez on the bridge of his nose.

“Because I’m going to hit you, and the pieces may get in your eye,” said the reporter unconcernedly.

Despite the unexpectedness of such a turn of the quarrel, nobody started laughing. Only Little White Manka oh’d in astonishment and clapped her hands. Jennie, with avid impatience, shifted her eyes from one to the other.

“

Well, what’s right is right!

” exclaimed Nhira. “Sergei Ivanich is like a holy hermit.”

The altar of the fatherland, Christian compassion for our neighbor, progress, sacred duty, sacred property, holy love. Ugh! I do not believe in a single fine word now, and I am nauseated to infinity with these petty liars, these cowards and gluttons! Beggar women! …

Man is born for great joy, for ceaseless creation, in which he is God; for a broad, free love, unhindered by anything⁠—love for everything: for a tree, for the sky, for man, for a dog, for the dear, benign, beautiful earth

—oh, especially for the earth with its beatific motherhood, with its mornings and nights, with its magnificent everyday miracles. But man has lied himself out so, has become such an importunate beggar, and has sunk so low! … Ah, Likhonin, but I am weary!”

for a broad, free love, unhindered by anything—love for everything: for a tree, for the sky, for man, for a dog, for the dear, benign, beautiful earth—oh, especially for the earth with its beatific motherhood, with its mornings and nights, with its magnificent everyday miracles.

But man has lied himself out so, has become such an importunate beggar, and has sunk so low!

… Ah, Likhonin, but I am weary!”

While my wife … she is a saint, and pure, my little dove! … Oh, if she knew, if she only knew! She works hard, she runs a modiste’s shop; her fingers—the fingers of an angel—are pricked with the needle, but I! Oh, sainted woman!

And I⁠—the scoundrel!⁠—whom do I exchange thee for! Oh, horror!

” The actor seized his hair. “Professor, let me, I’ll kiss your scholarly hand. You alone understand me. Let us go, I’ll introduce you, you’ll see what an angel this is!

There is a great law, I think, the same for inanimate objects as well as for all the tremendous and many-millioned human life: the power of exertion is equal to the power of resistance. The worse, the better.

Let evil and vindictiveness accumulate in mankind, let them grow and ripen like a monstrous abscess⁠—an abscess the size of the whole terrestrial sphere.

For it will burst some time! And let there be terror and insufferable pain. Let the pus deluge all the universe. But mankind will either choke in it and perish, or, having gone through the illness, will be regenerated to a new, beautiful life.”

their epidemicity, their strange succession and connectedness, their incomprehensible lingering. This occurs, as popular wisdom has long ago noted, in isolated families, where disease or death suddenly falls upon the near ones in an inevitable, enigmatic order. “

Misfortune does not come alone.

” “Misfortune without waits—open wide the gates.” This is to be noticed also in monasteries, banks, governmental departments, regiments, places of learning and other public institutions, where for a long time, almost for decades, life flows evenly, like a marshy river;

I also know that many—ah, how many!—of you cohabit with your fathers, brothers, and even sons, but these secrets you hide in some sort of a hidden casket. And that’s all the difference between us.

We are fallen, but we don’t lie and don’t pretend, but you all fall, and lie to boot.

Think it over for yourself; now—in whose favour is this difference?”

And now Jennka, the proud Jennka, fell to kissing the knees and hands of the artiste and was saying:

“Then why have people wronged me so?⁠ ⁠… Why have they wronged me so? Why? Why? Why?”

Such is the might of genius!

“Then why have people wronged me so? … Why have they wronged me so? Why? Why? Why?”

Such is the might of genius!

The only might which takes into its beautiful hands not the abject reason, but the warm soul of man! The self-respecting Jennka was hiding her face in Rovinskaya’s dress; Little White Manka was sitting meekly on a chair, her face covered with a handkerchief;

During the continuation of this flaming tirade the old cabby with great significance, although silently, began laughing, and from this inaudible laughter his back shook.

Old cabbies hear very many things, because to the cabby, sitting in front, everything is readily audible, which is not at all suspected by the conversing fares

; and many things do the old cabbies know of that which takes place among people. Who knows, perhaps he had heard more than once even more disordered, more lofty speeches?

For, they say, things do fall out that way … Only I mustn’t let him see anything. But that he’ll come again into my bed, and will come this very night—that’s as sure as God is holy.”

And Likhonin also fell into thought, grew quiet and sad; he was already feeling the weight of a great deed which he had undertaken beyond his powers.

That was why he was even glad when someone knocked on the door, and to his answer, “Come in!”, two students entered: Soloviev, and Nijeradze, who had slept that night at his place.

“Listen, Prince!

Every holy thought, every good deed, can be made disgusting, obscene.

There’s nothing clever or worthy in that. If you regard that which we’re preparing to do so like a stallion, then there’s the door and God be with you. Go away from us!”

but then, does not such a beginning of an industrious life, when every step is provided for—does it not lead to inevitable laxity and negligence, and, in the very end, to an indifferent disdain for business?

Even a child does not learn to walk until it has flopped down some fifty times.

No; if you really want to help this poor girl, you must give her a chance of getting on her feet at once, like a toiling being, and not like a drone. True, there is a great temptation here—the burden of labour, temporary need;

“Well, yes,” calmly retorted Simanovsky. “A dishwasher, a laundress, a cook.

All toil elevates a human being.

”

His head ached, while his arms and legs somehow seemed another’s; in addition, a drizzling and seemingly dirty rain had been falling on the street since morning. “

Always, now, when there’s some unpleasantness in store, there is inevitably a rain falling,

” reflected Likhonin, dressing slowly.

“I’d rub her into powder, the low-down creature? So that’s called her having loved, too!

If you love a man, then all that comes from him must be dear to you.

He goes to prison, and you go with him to prison. He’s become a thief, well, you help him. He’s a beggar, but still you go with him.

… was the fact that she, who had formerly been so accessible to all, ready to yield her love in one day to several people in succession, to each one for two roubles, was now all of a sudden playing at some pure and disinterested inamoration!

The welts of disgrace upon the soul are never thoroughly healed up, and shameful sex habits are never smoothed out of the memory.

“Nonsense,” he thought. “This can’t be. She’s making believe, and, probably, I don’t strike the right tone with her.”

“Right you are, there!” seconded the other. “

Lived to grin and died in sin.

Well, let’s go, mate, what?”

this black, stinking, filthy pit. But then, all the girls with whom I have met, and with whom I am living right now—understand, Platonov, understand me!—why, they don’t realize anything …

Talking, walking pieces of meat!

And this is even worse than my malice! …”

“I was neither malicious nor proud … It’s only now. I wasn’t ten yet when my own mother sold me; and since that time I’ve been travelling from hand to hand … If only someone had seen a human being in me! No! …

I am vermin, refuse, worse than a beggar, worse than a thief, worse than a murderer!

… Even a hangman … we have even such coming to the establishment—and even he would have treated me loftily, with loathing: I—am nothing; I—am a public wench! Do you understand, Sergei Ivanovich, what a horrible word this is? Pub-lic! … This means nobody’s:

… Even a hangman … we have even such coming to the establishment—and even he would have treated me loftily, with loathing: I—am nothing; I—am a public wench! Do you understand, Sergei Ivanovich, what a horrible word this is? Pub-lic! …

This means nobody’s: not papa’s, not mamma’s, not Russian, not Riyazan, but simply⁠—public!

And not once did it enter anybody’s head to walk up to me and think: why, now, this is a human being too; she has a heart and a brain;

“

I have gone through fire and water and pipes of brass⁠ ⁠… Nothing will stick to me any more.

”

“

There’s a devil dwells in me!

”

“I beg that no one be blamed for my death.

I am dying because I have become infected, and also because all people are scoundrels and it is very disgusting to live.

How to divide my things—Tamara knows about that. I told her in detail.”

And she was the first to retreat.

They say, that not long before a fire in a house, or before the wreck of a ship, the wise, nervous rats in droves make their way into another place.

And Anna Markovna was directed by the same ratlike, animal, prophetic intuition. And she was right: immediately right after the death of Jennka some fearful curse seemed to hang over the house, formerly Anna Markovna Shaibes’, but now Emma Edwardovna Titzner’s:

I will be to you like in place of your own mother, but only remember, that I will not stand for laziness, or drunkenness, or notions of any sort; or any kind of disorder.

The kind Madame Shaibes, it must be said, held you in too loose reins.

O-o, I will be far more strict. Discipline über alles … before everything. It’s a great pity, that the Russian people are lazy, dirty and stupid, and do not understand this rule;

“And so we’ll bury like a human being a woman dear to us.”

They say that dead people bring luck.

If there is any foundation at all in this superstition, then on this Saturday it could not have told plainer: the influx of visitors was out of the ordinary, even for a Saturday night.

“Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return …” she was mentally repeating the words of the canticles. “

Could it be that that would be all; only earth alone and nothing more? And which is better: nothing, or even anything at all⁠—even the most execrable⁠—but merely to be existing?

”