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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.

Anton Chekhov

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Anton Chekhov
Age: 44 †
Born: 1860
Born: January 1
Died: 1904
Died: January 1
Author
Dramaturge
Journalist
Novelist
Physician
Playwright
Prosaist
Satirist
Writer
Tahanroh
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Antón Pávlovič Čéhov
Antón Pávlovich Chékhov
Chekhov
Writing
Thirds
Going
Shouldn
Rifle
Absolutely
Rifles
Wall
Fired
Second
Chapter
Firsts
Chapters
First
Hanging
Must
Third

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People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about.
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Death can only be profitable: there's no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.
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Write only of what is important and eternal.
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And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.
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In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.
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Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.
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People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.
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If you want to work on your art, work on your life.
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Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games.
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A fiancé is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.
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When a person hasn't in him that which is higher and stronger than all external influences, it is enough for him to catch a good cold in order to lose his equilibrium and begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog's bark in every sound.
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When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.
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But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: My work is literature.
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There is nothing new in art except talent.
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[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.
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People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them.
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Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.
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The stupider the peasant, the better the horse understands him.
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