The Sea Gull (1968)

Harry Andrews: Sorin, Her Brother

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Quotes 

• Konstantin Treplev : [speaking to his uncle]  When the curtain goes up, on a room with 3 walls, lit by artificial lights, and these great artists, these high priests of art start imitating people eating, drinking, loving, moving about, wearing their humdrum clothes, when out of a few vulgar images and sentences they try to extract a moral, just a very little one, and that's got to be adaptable and convenient and safe for domestic use. Well, enough of the same old thing, over and over and over again in a thousand variations. I just take to my heels and run like Maupassant when he ran from the Eiffel Tower because of its vulgarity.

  Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin : [starts to applaud]  You can't do without it! Without the theater, i mean.

  Konstantin Treplev : We need change... we need new forms... and if we can't find them, it would be better to have nothing at all.

• Dr. Yevgeny Dorn : It's ungenerous to express discontent with life at the age of 67.

  Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin : What a stubborn fellow you are. Can't you understand that one may *want* to live?

  Dr. Yevgeny Dorn : That's just frivolous! It's one of the laws of nature that life has to have an end.

  Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin : You're arguing like a man who's had his fill. You've been satisfied. Therefore, you're indifferent to life, and you don't care. But you, too, will be afraid of dying!

  Dr. Yevgeny Dorn : The fear of death is an animal fear. Why don't you try to suppress it?

  Dr. Yevgeny Dorn : [pauses, then continues]  Only those who are afraid of their sins, believe in the life hereafter, can be consciously frightened of death. Now, you, in the first place, are an atheist. And what sins can you boast of, hmm? You served for 30 years in the Ministry of Justice, that's all.

  Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin : [loudly correcting him]  For THIRTY THREE!

• Konstantin Treplev : He's intelligent, naive, perhaps a little inclined to melancholy. He's decent enough. He's now 45 and he's already famous and bored stiff with the whole thing. His writing, I'd say is pleasant and not without talent. But, Tolstoy or Zola, I wouldn't want to start reading Trigorin.

  Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin : I must admit, dear boy, I'm rather drawn to literary men, myself. There was a time, in my youth, when there where two things I wanted passionately: to get married and to be a man of letters. But, I did neither. No, in deed. It would be nice to have been a mediocre writer, even, you know.

• Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin : Oh, I long to get away for an hour or so, from living like a fish in a bowl. I become stale here, like an old cigarette holder.