Quotes from A. I. Kuprin

But the one thing I don't understand is the incessant strain of the mind and will, the diabolical waste of spiritual strength.

There was no sorrow till the devil pumped it up," as we say in Russian.

Though you are Ivanov the seventh, you're a fool all the same.

It hardly can be called a sin, If something's funny and you grin! …

The pickpockets' profession demands extraordinary nimbleness and agility, a terrific certainty of movement, not to mention a ready wit, a talent for observation and strained attention.

Some have a positive vocation for breaking open safes: from their tenderest childhood they are attracted by the mysteries of every kind of complicated mechanism—bicycles, sewing machines, clock-work toys and watches.

But I tell you that you cannot entice a true thief, and thief by vocation, into the prose of honest vegetation by any gingerbread reward, or by the offer of a secure position, or by the gift of money, or by a woman's love: because there is here a permanent beauty of risk, a fascinating abyss of danger, the delightful sinking of the heart, the impetuous pulsation of life, the ecstasy!

Life has been so meagre, so insipid, so intolerably dull to eager and high-spirited souls!

But it is well known that the bourgeois pater-familias was specially devised by Heaven to utter commonplaces and trivialities.

Progress is a law—and theft too has its creation.

You can come and sit by our gate, and listen to the noise of a feasting; but we are clever enough to come to you for a dinner.

Can one remember the words uttered in the first moment of meeting between a mother and son, husband and wife, or lover and lover? The simplest, most ordinary, even ridiculous words are said, if they were put down exactly upon paper. But each word is opportune and infinitely dear because it is uttered by the dearest voice in all the world.

Can a man escape what Fate has doomed? It is useless for a man to be anxious the last days of his life.

up till now I have retained a deep conviction that a person is nowhere revealed so clearly as when he eats.

How could I disbelieve? Charms are in our destiny.

Why are you so stubborn, you little fool? Some one talks business to you, and you hold up your nose. As if nobody in the world was cleverer than you!