A close, daily intimacy between two people has to be paid for: it requires a great deal of experience of life, logic, and warmth of heart on both sides to enjoy each other’s good qualities without being irritated by each… — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share Image
“She never indulged in reveries or tried to be clever in her conversation; she seemed to have drawn a line in her mind beyond which she never went. It was quite obvious that feelings, every kind of relationship, including love, entered into her life on equal terms with everything else, while in the case of other women love quite manifestly… — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share
“But in love, merit is won blindly and unaccountably, and in this blindness and unaccountability lies happiness. pp. 445-446” — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share Image
“What? Do you suppose the intellect can work separately from the heart?” — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share Image
“As a young man, he had instinctively husbanded the freshness of his powers. At the time, it was too soon to see that this freshness was giving birth to vivacity and gaiety, and shape to the courage needed to forge a soul that does not pale, no matter what life brings, regards life not as a heavy burden, a cross,… — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share
“A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece… — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share
When you don't know what you're living for, you don't care how you live from one day to the next. You're happy the day… — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share Image
“Memories are either the greatest poetry, when they are memories of a vital happiness, or a burning pain, when they touch dried wounds. p. 479” — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share Image
“All at once he found his mind drawing a parallel between that destiny and his own existence; all at once questions of life arose before his vision, like owls in an ancient ruin flushed from sleep by a stray ray of sunlight. Somehow he felt pained and grieved at his arrested development, at the check which had taken place in… — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share
“Plunged up to the ears in work, good friend!" thought Oblomov as he watched him depart. "Yes, and blind and deaf and dumb to everything else in the world! Yet by going into society and, at the same time, busying yourself about your affairs you will yet win distinction and promotion. Such is what they call 'a career'! Yet of… — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share
“When all the forces in your organism come into play, then life will begin to play around you as well. You'll see what your eyes are closed to now, and you'll hear what you've never heard. The music of your nerves will begin to play, you'll hear the music of the spheres, and you'll listen to the grass grow. Just… — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share
It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required. — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share Image
“The moments of nature's universal, triumphant silence had come, those minutes when the creative mind works harder, poetic thoughts seethe more ardently, the heart's… — Ivan Goncharov Copy Share Image
