When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy-girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street.. it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death.. And they should! ..For they are in life. Roman Payne
About This Quote

This quote from the play The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov is a famous speech by a character named Yermolai. Yermolai is a young man who has lived a life of privilege and enjoys a very comfortable existence, but he faces a life without chance of happiness as his wife has been abandoned by her lover and now lives with another man. Yermolai is caught in a desperate situation as he knows that his uncle will have to return to live with them, but he does not know if this will be better or worse for him. In the end, he realizes that he must choose to live out his life in joy and happiness, even though it may be difficult to do so.

Source: The Wanderess

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More Quotes By Roman Payne
  1. Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another...
  2. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.
  3. It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and...
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  5. In life, more than in anything else, it isn’t easy to end up alive.
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