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Creative Quotations from Maxim Gorky
 Maxim Gorky Excerpt from Chapter 4 of Mother Other people came from the city, oftenest among them a tall, well-built young girl with large eyes set in a thin,
pale face. She was called Sashenka. There was something manly in her walk and movements; she knit her thick, dark eyebrows
in a frown, and when she spoke the thin nostrils of her straight nose quivered.
She was the first to say, “We are
socialists!” Her voice when she said it was loud and strident.
When the mother heard this word, she stared in dumb
fright into the girl’s face. But Sashenka, half closing her eyes, said sternly and resolutely: “We must give up
all our forces to the cause of the regeneration of life; we must realize that we will receive no recompense.”
The
mother understood that the socialists had killed the Czar. It had happened in the days of her youth; and people had then said
that the landlords, wishing to revenge themselves on the Czar for liberating the peasant serfs, had vowed not to cut their
hair until the Czar should be killed. These were the persons who had been called socialists. And now she could not understand
why it was that her son and his friends were socialists.
When they had all departed, she asked Pavel:
“Pavlusha,
are you a socialist?”
“Yes,” he said, standing before her, straight and stalwart as always. “Why?”
The mother heaved a heavy sigh, and lowering her eyes, said:
“So, Pavlusha? Why, they are against the Czar; they
killed one.”
Pavel walked up and down the room, ran his hand across his face, and, smiling, said:
“We
don’t need to do that!”
He spoke to her for a long while in a low, serious voice. She looked into his face
and thought:
“He will do nothing bad; he is incapable of doing bad!”
And thereafter the terrible word
was repeated with increasing frequency; its sharpness wore off, and it became as familiar to her ear as scores of other words
unintelligible to her. But Sashenka did not please her, and when she came the mother felt troubled and ill at ease.
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