Антон Чехов - Notebooks of Anton Chekhov

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There is no Monday which will not give its place to Tuesday.

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I am happy and satisfied, sister, but if I were born a second time and were asked: "Do you want to marry?" I should answer: "No." "Do you want to have money?" "No…."

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Lenstchka liked dukes and counts in novels, not ordinary persons. She loved the chapters in which there is love, pure and ideal not sensual. Descriptions of nature she did not like. She preferred conversations to descriptions. While reading the beginning she would glance impatiently at the end. She did not remember the names of authors. She wrote with a pencil in the margins: "Wonderful!" "Beautiful!" or "Serve him right!"

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Lenstchka sang without opening her mouth.

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Post coitum : We Balderiovs always excelled in vigor and health.

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He drove in a cab, and, as he watched his son walking away, thought: "Perhaps, he belongs to the race of men who will no longer trundle in scurvy cabs, as I do, but will fly through the skies in balloons."

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She is so beautiful that it is even frightening; dark eye–brows.

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The son says nothing, but the wife feels him to be an enemy; she feels that he has overheard everything….

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What a lot of idiots there are among ladies. People get so used to it that they do not notice it.

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They often go to the theatre and read serious magazines—and yet are spiteful and immoral.

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Nat : "I never have fits of hysterics. I am not a pampered darling." [21] This and the following few passages are from the rough draft of Chekhov's play Three Sisters .

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Nat : (continually to her sisters): "O, how ugly you have grown. O, how old you do look!"

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To live one must have something to hang on to…. In the provinces only the body works, not the spirit.

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You won't become a saint through other people's sins.

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Koulyguin : "I am a jolly fellow, I infect every one with my mood."

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Koul . Gives lessons at rich houses.

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Koul . In Act IV without mustaches.

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The wife implores the husband: "Don't get fat."

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O if there were a life in which every one grew younger and more beautiful.

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Irene : "It is hard to live without a father, without a mother."—"And without a husband."—"Yes, without a husband. Whom could one confide in? To whom could one complain? With whom could one share ones's joy? One must love some one strongly."

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Koulyguin (to his wife): "I am so happy to be married to you, that I consider it ungentlemanly and improper to speak of or even mention a dowry. Hush, don't say anything…."

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The doctor enjoys being at the duel.

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It is difficult to live without orderlies. You cannot make the servants answer your bell.

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The 2nd, 3rd, and 6th companies left at 4, and we leave at 12 sharp. [22] Here the fragments from the rough draft of Three Sisters end.

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In the daytime conversations about the loose manners of the girls in secondary schools, in the evening a lecture on degeneration and the decline of everything, and at night, after all this, one longs to shoot oneself.

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In the life of our towns there is no pessimism, no Marxism, and no movements, but there is stagnation, stupidity, mediocrity.

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He had a thirst for life, but it seemed to him to mean that he wanted a drink—and he drank wine.

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F. in the town–hall: Serguey Nik. in a plaintive voice: "Gentlemen, where can we get the means? Our town is poor."

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To be idle involuntarily means to listen to what is being said, to see what is being done; but he who works and is occupied hears little and sees little.

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In the skating rink he raced after L.; he wanted to overtake her and it seemed as if it were life which he wanted to overtake, that life which one cannot bring back or overtake or catch, just as one cannot catch one's shadow.

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Only one thought reconciled him to the doctor: just as he had suffered from the doctor's ignorance, so perhaps some one was suffering from his mistakes.

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But isn't it strange? In the whole town there is not a single musician, not a single orator, not a prominent man.

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Honorable Justice of the Peace, Honorable Member of the Children's Shelter—all honorable.

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L. studied and studied—but people who had finished developing could not understand her, nor could the young. Ut consecutivum .

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He is dark, with little side–whiskers, dressed like a dandy, dark eyes, a warm brunet. He exterminates bugs, talks about earthquakes and China. His fiancée has a dowry of 8,000 roubles; she is very handsome, as her aunt says. He is an agent for a fire–insurance company, etc. "You're awfully pretty, my darling, awfully. And 8,000 into the bargain! You are a beauty; when I looked at you to–day, a shiver ran down my back."

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He : Earthquakes are caused by the evaporation of water.

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Names: Goose, Pan, Oyster.

"Were I abroad, they would give me a medal for such a surname."

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I can't be said to be handsome, but I am rather pretty.

Among Chekhov's papers the following monologue was found, written in his own hand:

Solomon (alone): Oh! how dark is life! No night, when I was a child, so terrified me by its darkness as does my invisible existence. Lord, to David my father thou gavest only the gift of harmonizing words and sounds, to sing and praise thee on strings, to lament sweetly, to make people weep or admire beauty; but why hast thou given me a meditative, sleepless, hungry mind? Like an insect born of the dust, I hide in darkness; and in fear and despair, all shaking and shivering, I see and hear in everything an invisible mystery. Why this morning? Why does the sun come out from behind the temple and gild the palm tree? Why this beauty of women? Where does the bird hurry, what is the meaning of its flight, if it and its young and the place to which it hastens will, like myself, turn to dust? It were better I had never been born or were a stone, to which God has given neither eyes nor thoughts. In order to tire out my body by nightfall, all day yesterday, like a mere workman I carried marble to the temple; but now the night has come and I cannot sleep … I'll go and lie down. Phorses told me that if one imagines a flock of sheep running and fixes one's attention upon it, the mind gets confused and one falls asleep, I'll do it … (exit).

Tula is a Russian city where samovars are manufactured.

A very harmless purgative.

Cigs in Russian is a kind of fish.

Shtopov means "cork–screw."

The names of flowers.

There is a play on words here, the Russian word for butterfly also means a woman.

The word means five kopecks and also a pig's snout.

The name of a Russian town, meaning literally "Gold–carrier."

Glavizna in Russian is the name of a fish and also means beginning; the root of the verbs "to behead" and "to flog" are the same.