inside you ... it's all
right, have some more vodka."

* * * * *

The intelligentsia are good for nothing, because they drink a lot of
tea, talk a lot in stuffy rooms, with empty bottles.

* * * * *

When she was young, she ran away with a doctor, a Jew, and had
a daughter by him; now she hates her past, hates the red-haired
daughter, and the father still loves her as well as the daughter, and
walks under her window, chubby and handsome.

* * * * *

He picked his teeth and put the toothpick back into the glass.

* * * * *

The husband and wife could not sleep; they began to discuss how bad
literature had become and how nice it would be to publish a magazine:
the idea carried them away; they lay awake silent for awhile. "Shall
we ask Boborykin to write?" he asked. "Certainly, do ask him." At five
in the morning he starts for his work at the depot; she sees him off
walking in the snow to the gate, shuts the gate after him.... "And
shall we ask Potapenko?" he asks, already outside the gate.

* * * * *

When he learnt that his father had been raised to the nobility he
began to sign himself Alexis.

* * * * *

Teacher: "'The collision of a train with human victims' ... that is
wrong ... it ought to be 'the collision of a train that resulted in
human victims' ... for the cause of the people on the line."

* * * * *

Title of play: Golden Rain.

* * * * *

There is not a single criterion which can serve as the measure of the
non-existent, of the non-human.

* * * * *

A patriot: "And do you know that our Russian macaroni is better
than the Italian? I'll prove it to you. Once at Nice they brought me
sturgeon--do you know, I nearly cried." And the patriot did not see
that he was only gastronomically patriotic.

* * * * *

A grumbler: "But is turkey food? Is caviare food?"

* * * * *

A very sensible, clever young woman; when she was bathing, he noticed
that she had a narrow pelvis and pitifully thin hips--and he got to
hate her.

* * * * *

A clock. Yegor the locksmith's clock at one time loses and at another
gains exactly as if to