The Death of Ivan Ilyich Quotes

“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

“Ivan Ilych’s life continued to flow as he considered it should do—pleasantly and properly.”

“All you have lived for and still live for is falsehood and deception, hiding life and death from you.”

“On the whole his life ran its course as he believed life should do: easily, pleasantly, and decorously.”

“The pleasures connected with his work were pleasures of ambition; his social pleasures were those of vanity.”

“Wikipedia: The Death of Ivan Ilyich”

““I lost my life over that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort. Is that possible? How terrible and how stupid.””

“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.”

“In all this the thing was to exclude everything fresh and vital, which always disturbs the regular course of official business, and to admit only official relations with people, and then only on official grounds.”

“To save himself from this condition Ivan Ilych looked for consolations—new screens—and new screens were found and for a while seemed to save him, but then they immediately fell to pieces or rather became transparent.”

“"It is finished!" said someone near him. He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.
"Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more!"
He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.”

“He tried to get back into the former current of thoughts that had once screened the thought of death from him. But strange to say, all that had formerly shut off, hidden, and destroyed his consciousness of death, no longer had that effect.”

“Ivan Ilych’s chief pleasure was giving little dinners to which he invited men and women of good social position, and just as his drawing-room resembled all other drawing-rooms so did his enjoyable little parties resemble all other such parties.”

“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light. “So that's what it is!” he suddenly exclaimed aloud. “What joy!””

“To Ivan Ilych only one question was important: was his case serious or not? But the doctor ignored that inappropriate question. From his point of view it was not the one under consideration, the real question was to decide between a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or appendicitis.”

““Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,” it suddenly occurred to him. “But how could that be, when I did everything properly?” he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.”

“Why, and for what purpose, is there all this horror? But however much he pondered he found no answer. And whenever the thought occurred to him, as it often did, that it all resulted from his not having lived as he ought to have done, he at once recalled the correctness of his whole life and dismissed so strange an idea.”

““Just as the pain went on getting worse and worse, so my life grew worse and worse,” he thought. “There is one bright spot there at the back, at the beginning of life, and afterwards all becomes blacker and blacker and proceeds more and more rapidly.” … Life, a series of increasing sufferings, flies further and further towards its end—the most terrible suffering.”

“The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing room defusing an unpleasant odor) and this was done by that very decorum which he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position”

“One would have thought that it should have been clear to him that this exasperation with circumstances and people aggravated his illness, and that he ought therefore to ignore unpleasant occurrences. But he drew the very opposite conclusion: he said that he needed peace, and he watched for everything that might disturb it and became irritable at the slightest infringement of it.”