Anton Chekhov Quotes

One day, at my office, I wrote down some names and dates and notes, and I wrote a title, 'The Age of Despair,' and then some other 'Ages' - Innocence, God, Reason, Hope - and I wrote this as well: 'Woman, born in 1930, lives till the age of 80 or so, suffers depression, marries a car dealer, has children who grow up to confuse her.'

I realized that every second that I'm alive, the world cares less about me. It's just a very linear, downward progression. And it sounds cynical because you guys are young and you're full with life. I want you to understand - this is it. You have nothing to look forward to because you're peaking. If you're not having fun now, kill yourself. I don't mean that in a bad way, just - it's not worth it to go forward.

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.

If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

You're killing yourself with cynicism. Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to.

He saw merchants trading, princes hunting, mourners wailing for their dead, whores offering themselves, physicians trying to help the sick, priests determining the most suitable day for seeding, lovers loving, mothers nursing their children—and all of this was not worthy of one look from his eye, it all lied, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all pretended to be meaningful and joyful and beautiful, and it all was just concealed putrefaction. The world tasted bitter. Life was torture

I was jumping rope. Everything was fine. And then suddenly everything seemed so futile.

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.

I'm getting old. And I'm disappointed in everything just the way old people traditionally, boringly are. That bothers me because is it too traditional? Am I not fighting hard enough? I don't feel the fight. I don't feel it.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed—although he doesn’t know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you’re simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back.

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

Middle age is when you still believe you'll feel better in the morning.

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world

Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

Skepticism turns to cynicism, which leads to apathy and despair, which can cause sleeplessness, dry-mouth, and loss of sex drive?

The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.

Is That All There Is?

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

Once you stop believing in Santa Claus, the whole world just goes downhill.

I don't want to get depressed, I don't want to get down in the dumps, and I don't want to get teased with the idea that everything's rigged and everything's fake.

Men of my age live in a state of continual desperation.

What I've lost in years I've gained in wisdom. Bullshit, I haven't learnt one thing in the last 15 years that hasn't just depressed me more.