The More Simply We Look

There Are People Whom Even Children's Literature Would Corrupt. They Read With Particular Enjoyment The Piquant Passages In The Psalter And In The Wisdom Of Solomon.

One Must Not Put A Loaded Rifle On The Stage If No One Is Thinking Of Firing It.

Why Are We Worn Out? Why Do We, Who Start Out So Passionate, Brave, Noble, Believing, Become Totally Bankrupt By The Age Of Thirty Or Thirty-five? Why Is It That One Is Extinguished By Consumption, Another Puts A Bullet In His Head, A Third Seeks Oblivion In Vodka, Cards, A Fourth, In Order To Stifle Fear And Anguish, Cynically Tramples Underfoot The Portrait Of His Pure, Beautiful Youth? Why Is It That, Once Fallen, We Do Not Try To Rise, And, Having Lost One Thing, We Do Not Seek Another? Why?

If You Say In The First Chapter That There Is A Rifle Hanging On The Wall, In The Second Or Third Chapter It Absolutely Must Go Off. If It's Not Going To Be Fired, It Shouldn't Be Hanging There.

In All My Life I Never Met Anyone So Frivolous As You Two, So Crazy And Unbusinesslike. I Tell You In Plain Russian Your Property Is Going To Be Sold And You Don't Seem To Understand What I Say.