I don’t care for success. The ideas sitting in my head are annoyed by, and envious of, that which I’ve already written. - Anton Chekhov

I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.

Or he walked about and stopped in the drawing-room before a photograph taken seven years ago, soon after his marriage ... a family group: his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, his wife Olga Dmitrievna when she was twenty, and himself in the rôle of a happy young husband. His father-in-law, a clean-shaven, dropsical privy councillor, crafty and avaricious; his mother-in-law, a stout lady with small predatory features like a weasel, who loved her daughter to distraction and helped her in everything; if her daughter were strangling some one, the mother would not have protested, but would only have screened her with her skirts. Olga Dmitrievna, too, had small predatory-looking features, but more expressive and bolder than her mother's; she was not a weasel, but a beast on a bigger scale!

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.