'I have come to you against my wish,' she said in a firm voice: 'but I have been ordered to grant your request. Three, seven, ace, will win for you if played in succession, but only on these conditions: that you do not play more than one card in twenty-four hours, and that you never play again during the rest of your life. I forgive you my death, on condition that you marry my companion, Lizaveta Ivanovna.'

'The bread of the stranger is bitter,' says Dante, 'and his staircase hard to climb.' But who can know what the bitterness of dependence is so well as the poor…

Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.

Mosalsky: Good folk! Maria Godunov and her son Feodor have poisoned themselves. We have seen their dead bodies. [The People are silent with horror.] Why are ye…

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very …

Drink, my jolly lads, drink with discerning, Wedlock's a lane where there is no turning; Never was owl more blind than a lover, Drink and be merry, lads, half …

All of my gentlemen callers were sons of planters and of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of land with plen…