Sublime

Shvarts’s face with its British-style mustachios and the slender figure he cut in his coattails had, as ever, an elegant solemnity, and this solemnity, always at odds with his playful spirit, here was rather piquant. Or so it seemed to Pyotr Ivanovich.

He’d come to consider himself a connoisseur of the grotesque,

рессорная небольшая бричка, в какой ездят холостяки:

Dickens not only conquered the world, he conquered it with minor characters.

“No, that kind, monks, exactly that kind, that kind! You are saving your souls here on cabbage and you think you’re righteous! You eat gudgeons, one gudgeon a day, and you think you can buy God with gudgeons!”

“Mr. Constant,” he said, “right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and