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“If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“MEDVIEDENKO
Why do you always wear mourning?

MASHA
I dress in black to match my life. I am unhappy.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“We should show life neither as it is, nor as it should be, but as we see it in our dreams.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“Wine and tobacco destroy the individuality. After a cigar or a glass of vodka you are no longer Peter Sorin, but Peter Sorin plus somebody else. Your ego breaks in two: you begin to think of yourself in the third person.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“How easy it is, Doctor, to be a philosopher on paper, and how difficult in real life!”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“NINA
Your life is beautiful.

TRIGORIN
I see nothing especially lovely about it. [He looks at his watch] Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I am in a hurry. [He laughs] You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. [After a few moments' thought] Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth--I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“I'm in mourning for my life.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“It is always "Youth, youth," when there is nothing else to be said.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“NINA
Think of me sometimes.

TRIGORIN
I shall never forget you. I shall always remember you as I saw you that bright day--do you recall it?--a week ago, when you wore your light dress, and we talked together, and the white seagull lay on the bench beside us.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“TRIGORIN
Why do I hear a note of sadness that wrings my heart in this cry of a pure soul? If at any time you should have need of my life, come and take it.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“I feel as if I had been in the world a thousand years, and I trail my life behind me like an endless scarf.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Sea-Gull

“That's it, I guess. Just go on living, whether you feel like it or not.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“NINA. Your play is very hard to act; there are no living characters in it.

TREPLIEFF. Living characters! Life must be represented not as it is, but as it ought to be; as it appears in dreams.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“I am a sea-gull—no—no, I am an actress.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Sea-Gull

“MASHA : Happiness does not depend on riches; poor men are often happy.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“Love must be plucked out the moment it springs up in the heart.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Sea-Gull

“The fear of death is an animal passion which must be overcome. Only those who believe in a future life and tremble for sins committed, can logically fear death.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Sea-Gull

“The curtain rises. A vista opens across the lake. The moon hangs low above the horizon and is reflected in the water. NINA, dressed in white, is seen seated on a great rock.

NINA. All men and beasts, lions, eagles, and quails, horned stags, geese, spiders, silent fish that inhabit the waves, starfish from the sea, and creatures invisible to the eye—in one word, life—all, all life, completing the dreary round imposed upon it, has died out at last. A thousand years have passed since the earth last bore a living creature on her breast, and the unhappy moon now lights her lamp in vain. No longer are the cries of storks heard in the meadows, or the drone of beetles in the groves of limes. All is cold, cold. All is void, void, void. All is terrible, terrible—[A pause] The bodies of all living creatures have dropped to dust, and eternal matter has transformed them into stones and water and clouds; but their spirits have flowed together into one, and that great world-soul am I! In me is the spirit of the great Alexander, the spirit of Napoleon, of Caesar, of Shakespeare, and of the tiniest leech that swims. In me the consciousness of man has joined hands with the instinct of the animal; I understand all, all, all, and each life lives again in me.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“Nu-i nimic, mi-e mai uşor pe suflet dacă plâng...”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“NINA
I am alone. Once in a hundred years my lips are opened, my voice echoes mournfully across the desert earth, and no one hears. And you, poor lights of the marsh, you do not hear me. You are engendered at sunset in the putrid mud, and flit wavering about the lake till dawn, unconscious, unreasoning, unwarmed by the breath of life. Satan, father of eternal matter, trembling lest the spark of life should glow in you, has ordered an unceasing movement of the atoms that compose you, and so you shift and change for ever. I, the spirit of the universe, I alone am immutable and eternal. [A pause] Like a captive in a dungeon deep and void, I know not where I am, nor what awaits me. One thing only is not hidden from me: in my fierce and obstinate battle with Satan, the source of the forces of matter, I am destined to be victorious in the end. Matter and spirit will then be one at last in glorious harmony, and the reign of freedom will begin on earth. But this can only come to pass by slow degrees, when after countless eons the moon and earth and shining Sirius himself shall fall to dust. Until that hour, oh, horror! horror! horror! [A pause. Two glowing red points are seen shining across the lake] Satan, my mighty foe, advances; I see his dread and lurid eyes.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“For Masha: who doesn't know where she came from or why she goes on living.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“¡Personajes vivos! La vida, no hay que representarla como es, ni tampoco como debe ser, sino tal y como la imaginamos en sueños.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“Kako je lako biti filozof na papiru i kako je to teško u životu!”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“CONSTANTINE
Trigorin has worked out a process of his own, and descriptions are easy for him. He writes that the neck of a broken bottle lying on the bank glimmered in the moonlight, and that the shadows lay black under the mill-wheel. There you have a moonlit night before your eyes, but I speak of the shimmering light, the twinkling stars, the distant sounds of a piano melting into the still and scented air, and the result is abominable.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“Я имел подлость убить сегодня эту чайку. Кладу у ваших ног.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“Надо изображать жизнь не такою, как она есть, и не такою, как должна быть, а такою, как она представляется в мечтах.”
― Anton Chekhov, Чайка

“SORIN
Last night I went to bed at ten and woke at nine this morning, feeling as if, from oversleep, my brain had stuck to my skull. [Laughing] And yet I accidentally dropped off to sleep again after dinner, and feel utterly done up at this moment. It is like a nightmare.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull

“The conviction is gradually forcing itself upon me that good literature is not a question of forms new or old, but of ideas that must pour freely from the author’s heart, without his bothering his head about any forms whatsoever.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Seagull