Madame Anna Sergeyevna Odintsov Quotes in Fathers and Sons
“And so you have no feeling whatsoever for art?” she said, leaning her elbow on the table, a movement which brought her face closer to Bazarov. “How can you get on without it?”
“Why, what is it needed for, may I ask?”
“Well, at least to help one to know and understand people.”
Bazarov smiled. “In the first place, experience of life does that, and in the second, I assure you the study of separate individuals is not worth the trouble it involves. All men are similar, in soul as well as in body. Each of us has a brain, spleen, heart and lungs of similar construction; and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all of us - the slight variations are of no importance. It is enough to have one single human specimen in order to judge all the others. People are like trees in a forest: no botanist would dream of studying each individual birchtree.”
“Let bygones be bygones,” she said, “especially as, to be quite frank, I was also to blame, if not by being coquettish, then in some other fashion. In short, let us be friends as we were before. The other was a dream, was it not? And who ever remembers dreams?”
“Who indeed? And besides, love . . . is a purely imaginary feeling.”
“Really? I am very glad to hear you say that.”
So spoke Anna Sergeyevna, and so spoke Bazarov, and they both believed they were speaking the truth. Was the truth, the whole truth, to be found in their words? They themselves did not know, and still less does the author. But in the conversation that followed each appeared to have complete faith in the other.
Madame Anna Sergeyevna Odintsov Quotes in Fathers and Sons
“And so you have no feeling whatsoever for art?” she said, leaning her elbow on the table, a movement which brought her face closer to Bazarov. “How can you get on without it?”
“Why, what is it needed for, may I ask?”
“Well, at least to help one to know and understand people.”
Bazarov smiled. “In the first place, experience of life does that, and in the second, I assure you the study of separate individuals is not worth the trouble it involves. All men are similar, in soul as well as in body. Each of us has a brain, spleen, heart and lungs of similar construction; and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all of us - the slight variations are of no importance. It is enough to have one single human specimen in order to judge all the others. People are like trees in a forest: no botanist would dream of studying each individual birchtree.”
“Let bygones be bygones,” she said, “especially as, to be quite frank, I was also to blame, if not by being coquettish, then in some other fashion. In short, let us be friends as we were before. The other was a dream, was it not? And who ever remembers dreams?”
“Who indeed? And besides, love . . . is a purely imaginary feeling.”
“Really? I am very glad to hear you say that.”
So spoke Anna Sergeyevna, and so spoke Bazarov, and they both believed they were speaking the truth. Was the truth, the whole truth, to be found in their words? They themselves did not know, and still less does the author. But in the conversation that followed each appeared to have complete faith in the other.