Discover the best quotes and phrases from the book The Death of Ivan Ilyich Quotes by Leo Tolstoy
"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories)
"It is impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror!"
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
"There was no deceiving himself: something terrible, new, and more important than anything before in his life, was taking place within him of which he alone was aware."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
"It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
"What tormented Ivan Ilyich most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and the only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
"Again minute followed minute and hour followed hour. Everything remained the same and there was no cessation. And the inevitable end of it all became more and more terrible. “Yes,"
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
"She began to wish he would die; yet she did not want him to die because then his salary would cease. And this irritated her against him still more. She considered herself dreadfully unhappy just because not even his death could save her,"
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
"At the bottom of his heart Ivan Ilyich knew that he was dying; but so far from growing used to the idea, he simply did not grasp it - he was utterly unable to grasp it"
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
"The mere fact of the death of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the complacent feeling that, “it is he who is dead and not I."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
"Ivan Iylich saw that he was dying, and was in continual despair.
At the bottom of his heart Ivan Ilyich knew that he was dying; but so far from growing used to the idea, he simply did not grasp it - he was utterly unable to grasp it.
The example of the syllogism that he had learned in Kiseveter's logic - Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal - had seemed to him all his life correct only as regards Caius, but not at all regards himself. In that case it was a question of Caius, a man, an abstract man, and it was perfectly true, but he was not Caius, and was not an abstract man; he had always been a creature quite, quite different from all the others."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilych)
"They had supper and went away, and Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.
With this consciousness, and with physical pain besides the terror, he must go to bed, often to lie awake the greater part of the night. Next morning he had to get up again, dress, go to the law courts, speak, and write; or if he did not go out, spend at home those twenty-four hours a day each of which was a torture. And he had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilych)
"At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilych)
"When the examination was over, the doctor looked at his watch, and then Praskovya Fyodorovna informed Ivan Ilyich that it must of course be as he liked, but she had sent today for a celebrated doctor, and that he would examine him, and have a consultation with Mihail Danilovich (that was the name of his regular doctor). 'Don't oppose it now, please. This I'm doing entirely for my own sake,' she said ironically, meaning it to be understood that she was doing it all for his sake, and was only saying this to give him no right to refuse her request. He lay silent, knitting his brows. He felt that he was hemmed in by such a tangle of falsity that it was hard to disentangle anything from it. Everything she did for him was entirely for her own sake, and she told him she was doing for her own sake what she actually was doing for her own sake as something so incredible that he would take it as meaning the opposite."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
"What do you want? What do you want?” he repeated to himself. “What do I want? To live and not to suffer,” he answered. And again he listened with such concentrated attention that even his pain did not distract him. “To live? How?” asked his inner voice. “Why, to live as I used to—well and pleasantly.” “As you lived before, well and pleasantly?” the voice repeated. And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life."
— Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich)
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