Anton Chekhov

And the weather is glorious. The air is still, fresh, and transparent.
The night is dark, but one can see the whole village with its white roofs and coils of smoke coming from the chimneys, the trees silvered with hoar frost, the snowdrifts. The whole sky spangled with gay twinkling stars, and the Milky Way is as distinct as though it had been washed and rubbed with snow for a holiday...

If a lady allows you to kiss her hand, you'll want to kiss her elbow next, and then her shoulder.

Melancholy crept on her imperceptibly and took possession of her by degrees, as darkness does of a room.

When one thinks about eating one's heart grows lighter, and Auntie began thinking how that day she had stolen the leg of a chicken from Fyodor Timofeyitch, and had hidden it in the drawing-room, between the cupboard and the wall, where there were a great many spiders' webs and a great deal of dust. Would it not be as well to go now and look whether the chicken leg were still there or not? It was very possible that her master had found it and eaten it.

At present very few work in Russia. The vast majority of the educated people that I know seek after nothing, do nothing, and are as yet incapable of work. They call themselves the "intelligentsia", but they speak rudely to the servants, they treat the peasants like animals, learn nothing, read nothing serious, do absolutely nothing, only talk about science, and know little or nothing about art.

O Lord, you have given us mighty forests, boundless fields, the widest horizons, and we who live here ought really to be giants.

Only twice in the whole day had she tasted a morsel: she had eaten a little paste at the bookbinder's, and in one of the taverns she had found a sausage skin on the floor, near the counter that was all. If she had been a human being she would have certainly thought:
"No, it is impossible to live like this! I must shoot myself!"

A girl must never forget herself. What I hate is a girl being flighty in her behaviour.

All mankind Kashtanka divided into two uneven parts: masters and customers; between them there was an essential difference: the first had the right to beat her, and the second she had the right to nip by the calves of their legs.