“Emerging from barbarism is a slow process and as man is , geologically speaking, still very young, he has his whole future before him.”

“He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.”

“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”

“From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.”

“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”

“He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young man across from him...came to hate him for that look. The young man lit a cigarette from his, tried talking to him, and even jostled him, to let him feel that he was not a thing but a human being, but Vronsky went on looking at him as at a lampost, and the young man grimaced, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the pressure of this non-recognition of himself as a human being...”