“His little eyes, which looked as if they'd literally been hammered into place, gazed out fixedly and uncomfortably, and he also had a way of laughing uncomfortably with an abrupt, wooden laugh.”

“What I'm thinking is: here I am, lying under a haystack ... The tiny little place I occupy is so small in relation to the rest of space where I am not and where it's none of my business; and the amount of time which I'll succeed in living is so insignificant by comparison with the eternity where I haven't been and never will be ... And yet in this atom, in this mathematical point, the blood circulates, the brain works and even desires something as well .. What sheer ugliness! What sheer nonsense!”

“I must say, though, that a man who has staked his whole life on the card of a woman's love and who, when that card is trumped, falls to pieces and lets himself go to the dogs -- a fellow like that is not a man, not a male. You say he's unhappy -- you know best. But all the nonsense hasn't been taken out of him yet. I'm sure he really believes he's a smart fellow just because he reads that rag Galignani and saves a muzhik from a flogging once a month.”

“Again his dead wife came back to his imagination, but not as he had known her for many years, not as the good domestic housewife, but as a young girl with a slim figure, innocently inquiring eyes, and a tight twist of hair on her childish neck. He remembered how he had seen her for the first time. He was still a student then. He had met her on the staircase of his lodgings, and, jostling by accident against her, he tried to apologise, and could only mutter, 'Pardon, monsieur,' while she bowed, smiled, and suddenly seemed frightened, and ran away, though at the bend of the staircase she had glanced rapidly at him, assumed a serious air, and blushed. Afterwards, the first timid visits, the half-words, the half-smiles, and embarrassment; and melancholy, and yearnings, and at last that breathing rapture.... Where had it all vanished? She had been his wife, he had been happy as few on earth are happy.... 'But,' he mused, 'these sweet first moments, why could one not live an eternal, undying life in them?”

“Looking about me, listening and recalling what the day had been like, I suddenly felt a secret unease in my heart and raised my eyes to the sky, but even in the sky there seemed to be no tranquillity. Dotted with stars, it constantly quivered and danced and shivered.”

“Good-bye,' he said with sudden force, and his eyes gleamed with their last light. 'Good-bye.... Listen ... you know I didn't kiss you then.... Breathe on the dying lamp, and let it go out ...”

“The enchanted world arising out of the dim mists of the past, into which he just stepped, quivered-and disappeared.”