Sublime

“Brother, let me ask you one more thing: can it be that any man has the right to decide about the rest of mankind, who is worthy to live and who is more unworthy?”

Among the stories we read in that class, Chekhov’s “Lady with Lapdog” moved me much more deeply. I especially remember the passage about how everyone has two lives—one open and visible, full of work, convention, responsibilities, jokes, and the other “running its course in secret”—and how easy it is for circumstances to line up so that everything y

We sat and talked about books and authors, and I gave my best impersonation of a model tenant, a man whose checks wouldn’t bounce and who wouldn’t cause any fuss.

To rephrase Tolstoy’s famous line, all happiness is alike, but each pain is painful in its own way.

“I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends,” says Dr. Rieux. “For the moment I know this; there are sick people and they need curing.”

In the first moment he felt like a man who, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, turns with vexation and a desire for revenge to find out who did it, and realizes that he has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with and he must endure and ease the pain.

In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight that thing enjoys Dickens.

The thought of such suffering in someone he’d known so well, first as a carefree little boy, then in school, and later as an adult and colleague, suddenly filled Pyotr Ivanovich with horror, despite even this woman’s affectation, as well as his own, which it was unpleasant to notice. All at once he couldn’t shake the image of that forehead, the nos

his anguish;