Goncharov Quotes & Sayings

Sadly, however, the sight of her generous D cups no longer sparked an ounce of interest from Little Sam, the man in charge of social activities. — Sarah Mayberry

Life is duty and obligation, therefore love, too, is a duty. It's as if God sent it to me,' she said, looking up at the sky, 'and told me to love.'
p. 265 — Ivan Goncharov

You know what, I don't really watch a lot of cooking shows, but what's great about them is that it inspires a lot of the younger generation so, you know, with cooking shows and reality shows and the social media, I think it really makes our industry a hotter industry. — Roy Yamaguchi

The trouble is that no devastating or redeeming fires have ever burnt in my life ... My life began by flickering out. — Ivan Goncharov

She attended the French performance, but the play's content now had a connection to her life. She read a book and the book invariably had lines with sparks from her mind, the fire of her emotions flickered here and there, and words spoken the night before were written down, as if the author had overheard how her heart beat.
The forest held the same trees, but their sound had taken on special meaning; she had established a vibrant consonance with them. The birds did not simply twitter and chirp but were saying something to each other. Everything around her spoke and responded to her mood; a flower would blossom and she seemed to hear its breathing.
pp. 256-257 — Ivan Goncharov

I remember the first time somebody played me Janis Joplin. My friend Donna put on Janis Joplin, and she said, 'You're like her.' At the time, I wasn't even a singer; I was a drummer. I just wanted to play the drums. — Sophie B. Hawkins

I don't know what I'm proudest of. The fact that my kids still talk to me. — Alan Arkin

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When all the forces in your organism come into play, then life will begin to play around you as well. You'll see what your eyes are closed to now, and you'll hear what you've never heard. The music of your nerves will begin to play, you'll hear the music of the spheres, and you'll listen to the grass grow. Just wait, there's no hurry. It will come in its own time!
p. 257 — Ivan Goncharov

I desire nothing, seek nothing but peace, the slumber of the soul. I have tasted all the hollowness and wretchedness of life and I despise it heartily. Whoever has lived and thought cannot but, in his soul, despise humanity. Activity, cares, worries, distractions - I am sick of them all. I wish for nothing, I seek nothing. I have no aim, for one gains that which one is eager for - and sees that it is all illusion. My joyous days have passed. I have cooled to them. In the educated world, amidst human beings, I feel the disadvantages of life too strongly, but alone, far from the crowd, I turn to stone. In this trance anything can happen, I see neither others nor myself. I do nothing and do not notice the actions either of others or myself - and I am at peace, I am indifferent. There can be no happiness for me, and I will not succumb to unhappiness. — Ivan Goncharov

Plunged up to the ears in work, good friend!" thought Oblomov as he watched him depart. "Yes, and blind and deaf and dumb to everything else in the world! Yet by going into society and, at the same time, busying yourself about your affairs you will yet win distinction and promotion. Such is what they call 'a career'! Yet of how little use is a man like that! His intellect, his will, his feelings
what do they avail him? So many luxuries is what they are
nothing more.
Such an individual lives out his little span without achieving a single thing worth mentioning; and meanwhile he works in an office from morning till night
yes, from morning till night, poor wretch! — Ivan Goncharov

She never indulged in reveries or tried to be clever in her conversation; she seemed to have drawn a line in her mind beyond which she never went. It was quite obvious that feelings, every kind of relationship, including love, entered into her life on equal terms with everything else, while in the case of other women love quite manifestly takes part, if not in deeds, then in words, in all the problems of life, and everything else is allowed in only in so far as love leaves room for it. The thing this woman esteemed most was the art of living, of being able to control oneself, of keeping a balance between thought and intention, intention and realization. You could never take her unawares, by surprise, but she was like a watchful enemy whose expectant gaze would always be fixed on you, however hard you tried to lie in wait for him. High society was her element, and therefore tact and caution prompted her every thought, word, and movement. — Ivan Goncharov

When you don't know what you're living for, you don't care how you live from one day to the next. You're happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep you bury the tedious question of what you lived for that day and what you're going to live for tomorrow. — Ivan Goncharov

People never want to be told anything they do not believe already. — James Branch Cabell

I expected so much from life and if I had not seen it so close, I would to this day be expecting something. What treasures I discovered in my own soul - where are they all? I have exchanged them for the world's coin, given my frankness, my first passion - and for what? For bitter disillusionment, for the knowledge that all is deception, all is brittle, that one can place trust neither in oneself nor in others - and I have come to fear both others and myself. I have not been able, along with this analysis, to accept the trifles of life and be content with them, as many others do. — Ivan Goncharov

Although people call love a capricious and unaccountable emotion that arises like an illness, nonetheless it has its own laws and reasons, like everything else. If these laws have been little studied so far, that is because a person struck down by love is in no condition to observe with a scholar's eye as the impression steals into his soul and shackles his emotions like a dream, as first his eyes go blind, at which moment his pulse and then his heart begin beating harder, all of a sudden there arises as of yesterday an undying devotion, the desire to sacrifice oneself; one's I gradually vanishes and crosses over into him or her; the mind becomes wither unusually dull or unusually sharp; the will surrenders to the will of another; and the head bows, the knees shake and the tears and fever come. — Ivan Goncharov

What? Do you suppose the intellect can work separately from the heart? — Ivan Goncharov

As a young man, he had instinctively husbanded the freshness of his powers. At the time, it was too soon to see that this freshness was giving birth to vivacity and gaiety, and shape to the courage needed to forge a soul that does not pale, no matter what life brings, regards life not as a heavy burden, a cross, but merely as a duty, and does battle with it with dignity.
He had devoted much mental care to his heart and its wise laws. Observing the reflection of beauty on the imagination, both consciously and unconsciously, then the transition from impression to emotion, its symptoms, play, and outcome and looking around himself, advancing into life, he derived for himself the conviction that love moves the world like Archimede's lever, that it holds as much universal and irrefutable truth and good as misunderstanding and misuse do hypocrisy and ugliness.
p. 494 — Ivan Goncharov

The common herd of "burghers", those cattle, complete with horns, who turn millstones with their bare hands. — Ivan Goncharov

I began life with a quenching of the light of day, and, from the first moment that I realized myself, realized also that I was on the wane. — Ivan Goncharov

A close, daily intimacy between two people has to be paid for: it requires a great deal of experience of life, logic, and warmth of heart on both sides to enjoy each other's good qualities without being irritated by each other's shortcomings and blaming each other for them. — Ivan Goncharov

If you worry about falling down, and never 'up,' the sky will remain forever out of reach. — Ellen Hopkins

these fond parents were not blind to the value of education it was that they realized only its external value. That is to say, they could not look beyond the fact that education enabled folk to get on in the world so far as the acquisition of rank, crosses, and money was concerned.
Certain evil rumours had arisen regarding the necessity of learning not only one's letters, but also various branches of science which until now had remained unknown to the world of Oblomovka; but, as I say, the good folk of that place had only the dimmest, the remotest, comprehension of any internal demand for education, and therefore desired to secure for their little Ilya only certain showy advantages, and no more--to wit, a fine uniform, and the getting of him into the Civil Service (his mother even foresaw him become a provincial governor!). — Ivan Goncharov

Talent is everywhere, winning attitude is not. — Dan Gable

The moments of nature's universal, triumphant silence had come, those minutes when the creative mind works harder, poetic thoughts seethe more ardently, the heart's passion blazes more brightly and its longing aches more painfully, the grain of criminal thought ripens in a cruel soul more imperturbably and powerfully. — Ivan Goncharov

A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins.
But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around.
pp. 492-493 — Ivan Goncharov

But in love, merit is won blindly and unaccountably, and in this blindness and unaccountability lies happiness.
pp. 445-446 — Ivan Goncharov

Now or neverI 'To be or not to be!' - Oblomov raised himself from his chair a little, but failing to find his slippers with his feet at once, sat down again. — Ivan Goncharov

Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons. — Ernest Hemingway,

Memories are either the greatest poetry, when they are memories of a vital happiness, or a burning pain, when they touch dried wounds.
p. 479 — Ivan Goncharov

Memories are the height of poetry only when they are memories of happiness. When they graze wounds over which scars have formed they become an aching pain. — Ivan Goncharov

Sometimes we go so focused on bringing people to the meetinghouse that we forget we are supposed to be bringing them to Christ. — M. Russell Ballard

Yesterday one has wished, to-day one attains the madly longed-for object, and to-morrow one will blush to think that one ever desired it. — Ivan Goncharov

For, as every one knows, dogs cannot with equanimity see a human being running. — Ivan Goncharov

Yes, and I think I will have enough strength to live and love my whole life through. One without the other is impossible.
p. 265 — Ivan Goncharov

Write it all down," Bokonon tells us. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Dixon, our, um, Lives? are in Danger?" "Hardly enough to interrupt a perfectly good - " Here he is silenc'd by an immense Thunder-Bolt from directly overhead, as their frail Prism is bleach'd in unholy Light. " - Saturday Night for, is it I ask you . . . ?" his Head emerging at last from beneath a Blanket, "Mason? Say, Mason, - are thee . . . ?" Mason, now outside, pushes aside the Tent-flap with his head, but does not enter. "Dixon. I will now seek Shelter beneath that Waggon out there, d'ye see it? If you wish to join me, there's room." "Bit too much Iron there for me, thanks all the same. — Thomas Pynchon

A painting with a message does not happen by accident. It happens when you place elements in their order of importance. — Mike Svob

He who would do great things should not attempt them all alone. — Seneca The Younger

It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required. — Ivan Goncharov

Love was life's hardest school of all.
p. 259 — Ivan Goncharov

He had never clearly fathomed the true weight of a word of good, truth, and purity cast in the stream of human speech and the deep bend it cut in it. Nor had he thought that a word spoken boldly and loudly, with no hint of false shame, but rather with courage, that this word would not drown in the ugly cries of fashionable satyrs but would plunge like a pearl into the abyss of public life and always find itself a shell.
Many stumble over a good word, blushing in embarrassment, and utter a careless word boldly and loudly, never suspecting that it, too, unfortunately, will not go for naught but will leave a long trail of often times ineradicable evil.
p. 296 — Ivan Goncharov