To fear love is to fear life, and those whose fear life are already three parts dead... - Anton Chekhov

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know — which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

BORKIN: [Sighing] The life of a man is like a flower, blooming so gaily in a field. Then, along comes a goat, he eats it, and the flower is gone!

The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.