Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

"was coming to that troubled twilight time, a time of regrets that resemble hopes, of hopes that resemble regrets, when youth is past but old age has not yet come."

"Ah, but in time the heat of noontide passes, and to it there succeed nightfall and dusk, with a return to the quiet fold where for the weary an the heavy-laden there waits sleep, sweet sleep."

"A man's capable of understanding anything - how the ether vibrates, and what's going on in the sun - but how any other man can blow his nose differently from him, that he's incapable of understanding."

"You are an old pig!'one of them said to the other. 'And that is worse than being a young one."

"I want everything or nothing. A life for a life, taking one and giving up another without hesitation and beyond recall. Or else better have nothing!"

"Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!"