"I woke up this morning, got our of bed, washed, and all at once everything in the world seemed clear to me. I seemed to know how to live."
Irina says this in the first scene of the play. It is her name day, and she raves to Chebutykin that she has finally discovered the key to a contented life. In order to be happy, she says, people must work; that is the only way to find purpose. This typifies Irina's bright, impressionable, and innocent outlook on life. She speaks with an innocent and youthful sense of possibility, and her earnest attitude reflects her purity as a young and hopeful woman, looking into the future with optimism.
"There's nothing good in me but my love for you, and if it weren't for you I'd have long since breathed my last..."
Chebutykin, the old doctor who lives with the Prozorovs, says this in the first scene of the play. As he grows older, his outlook is getting bleaker and bleaker, but the presence of the beautiful young Prozorov sisters keeps him young and happy, and enriches his life. He expresses his gratitude and admiration for the sisters here.
"Yes, we'll be forgotten. That's the way things are. There's nothing we can do about it. Things that appear serious, significant, so very important—the time will come when they're forgotten or seem unimportant."
Vershinin says this to Masha early on in the play. Vershinin loves to philosophize, especially about the future, and hear he considers the fact that all of their cares and concerns will one day be trivial. Vershinin often reminds other characters of their own mortality, and of the fact that the things that seem important are small in the grand scheme.
"You say that many years from now life on earth will be beautiful, wonderful. True enough. But if we wish to take part in it now, even at a distance, we must make the necessary preparations, we must work..."
Tusenbach may not be able to win Irina's heart, but he shows early on that he shares her philosophies about work. When Vershinin suggests that life will be better for future generations, Tusenbach makes a slight adjustment by saying that if they want to ensure this, they must work.
"The Romans were healthy because they knew how to work and how to relax."
Kulygin, Masha's kindhearted husband, is a schoolteacher, and specializes in Latin. As such, he is caught up in the past, obsessed with Roman culture and in comparing modern life to the ancients. This line shows that he has some wisdom to offer the group, but that he is also caught up in his area of study in a somewhat myopic way.
"Anything coarse upsets and offends me; it makes me suffer to see a person lacking refinement, lacking sensitivity, manners."
This rather snobbish comment comes from Masha in Act 2, when she is talking to Vershinin about her discontentment with being married to a schoolteacher. She bemoans the fact that she must spend so much time with provincial, unrefined people, and misses being with people from the educated upper classes.
"There's no reason to get married. None. It's a bore."
Andrei says this to Chebutykin when the old doctor is bemoaning the fact that he never married. Andrei tells him that being married is not so nice as it seems, alluding to the fact that he is unhappy in his marriage to Natasha, who is having an affair.
"My head is empty, my heart is cold. Maybe I'm not even human. Maybe I only pretend to have arms and legs and a head. Maybe I don't exist at all and only imagine that I walk, eat, and sleep."
In the third act, during the fire, Chebutykin, a messy drunk, has a few too many vodkas for the first time in years. He is completely drunk and upset about his life, feeling that it has passed him by, and remorseful about the fact that a woman under his medical care died that week. His way of coping with his own pain is to abstract and imagine that everything is a dream. In these lines, he wonders what it all means if life is just an illusion.
"At first I found him strange, then I felt sorry for him...Then I fell in love...in love with his voice, his words, his misfortunes, his two little girls..."
After the fire, and after everyone has left Olga and Irina's room, Masha confesses to her sisters that she has fallen in love with Vershinin, in spite of being married. She outlines the trajectory of her falling in love with him, and confesses with abandon, even though Olga objects and doesn't want to hear it.
"I didn't have any coffee this morning. Ask them to make some for me, will you?"
These are the last words that Tusenbach says to Irina before going off to duel with Solyony. It is a very sad line, because Tusenbach has not told Irina where he is going, and he knows that he might die in the duel. Nevertheless, he acts as if he is simply running a quick errand, and will want some coffee when he gets back. Rather than express his apprehensions about the duel, he makes a request of Irina as though nothing is happening at all.
