Quotes from A. I. Kuprin

I, who am not afraid of death, was afraid of the shouting of this dull, narrow-minded clod, petrified with professional conceit.

He was courteous, obliging, and sugary to them, like a suburban dentist.

But in me he saw at once a weak, yielding will. You can feel it in people at a mere glance—there's no need of words.

Desperately brave generals are often frightened of mice. Sometimes they even boast of their little weakness.

But I say with sorrow that I fear these wooden people, whose view of the world is rigid and unchangeable, who are stupidly self-confident, and have no hesitations, worse than death.

These people's souls are dead: their thoughts are fixed in straight inflexible lines; and they are merciless as only a convinced and stupid man can be.

My mind opened eagerly to meet them, but my soul was already ruined for ever, soiled and dead. It had been bitten by a mean, weak-nerved timidity, like a tick in a dog's ear: you tear it off, but the small head remains to grow again into a complete, loathsome insect.

I was not the only one to die of the moral contagion, though perhaps I was the weakest of all. But all the past generation has grown up in an atmosphere of sanctimonious tranquillity, of forced respect to its elders, of lack of all individuality and dumbness.

the quiet degradation of the human soul is more horrible than all the barricades and slaughter in the world.

But I am afraid of people. I fear people! When from my room I hear drunken men swearing and fighting in the street I go pale with terror.

I am always frightened of something which exists in the majority of people, but which I cannot explain. The young generation of the period of transition were like me. In our mind we despised our slavery, but we ourselves became cowardly slaves. Our hatred was deep and passionate, but barren, like the mad love of a eunuch.

I am always frightened of something which exists in the majority of people, but which I cannot explain. The young generation of the period of transition were like me. In our mind we despised our slavery, but we ourselves became cowardly slaves.

The flame of long pent-up anger broke out and overwhelmed everything: fear of the morrow, respect for parents, love of life, peaceful joys of family happiness.

It was all born suddenly, in a tempestuous wind. Eagles awoke out of turkey eggs.

It is true the precious schoolboy is very nearly ridiculous, but a sacred respect for his proud free self is already growing up within him, a respect for everything that has been corroded in us by spiritual poverty and anxious paternal morality. We must go to the devil.

And who can say whether my thoughts, independent of weight and time and the obstacles of matter, are not at the same moment being caught by mysterious, delicate, but unconscious receivers in the brain of an inhabitant of Mars as well as in the brain of the dog who barks outside?

Ah, I think that nothing in the world vanishes utterly—nothing—not only what is said, but what is thought. All our deeds and words and thoughts are little streams, trickling springs underground.

Surely the obscure soul of the dog must be far more susceptible to the vibrations of thought than the human. … Do they not bark because they feel the presence of a dead man?

I can't understand these student fellows. They don't want to study. They brandish a red flag, and then shoot themselves. They don't want to understand what their parents must feel.

There is something of the preacher essential in every Russian intellectual. It is in our blood; it has been instilled by the whole of Russian literature in the last generations

Couldn't you give me one small smoke? I'm dying to smoke. And I haven't a cent to buy them. "Blessed are the poor. … Poverty's no crime," as they say—but sheer indecency.

Russia's joy's in the bottle!

Still—nowadays, the most impossible things are possible.

The man who fights learns to pray, you know. It's a splendid Russian proverb.