Quote

There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

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
World
Number
Crab
People
Numbers
Hermit
Small
Hermits
Nature
Crabs
Back
Snail
Trying
Shell
Always
Shells
Like
Solitary

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I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
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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.
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Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there's an unfinished novel waiting for me.
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I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.
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Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.
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Women can't forgive failure.
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One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.
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The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy...
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A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.
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Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
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How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.
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[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature 2. total objectivity 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects 4. extreme brevity 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype 6. compassion.
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In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.
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I am writing a play which I probably will not finish until the end of November. I am writing it with considerable pleasure, though I sin frightfully against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female parts, six male, four acts, a landscape (view of the lake), lots of talk on literature, little action and tons of love.
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I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.
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You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.
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If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.
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It's worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.
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The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
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It's not a matter of old or new forms a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.
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