"The stimulating effect of this place is wonderful. I don't know what it is, but it is just life to everything in one. I have absolute peace of mind and I have no mental worries or torments. Nothing seems complicated, nothing seems involved and everything that I can help is satisfactory. I want to lose myself in my work and I have every advantage for doing so. Paris is wonderful, I never so appreciated it before."
"I am so busy, I have my whole week planned ahead for almost every second. You see I am at the studio every morning including Saturday and have several lessons a week in the afternoon. New Years I dined at the La Beaumes. There was just the immediate family and we were twenty-three at table." (These were part of a French branch of the relatives of Nelka on her mother's side.)
Paris 1900.
"I can understand people with no sentiment, but I will not tolerate people who scoff at it."
"I am so glad to have the Russian church here. I go every Sunday."
Paris 1900.
"I don't have a minute to spare. This is what I wanted and the life though very full is easy and tranquil. The free reality of thought is delightful and wonderful. I do not include freedom of expression. I wonder how much I fool myself? It is not an intolerance which wishes to promote self but which is limited and dead to a variation of its own species because it lacks the consciousness of its own incompleteness. A man who does not wish to dominate and emphasize his will upon his surroundings, including people, is not a whole man. My Russian is getting on. I will be very glad when I have mastered the language, then I am going to begin Italian."
As a child Nelka did not speak Russian and only started studying it when grown up. When she later went to Russia she still was very weak in the language and only gradually picked it up with practice, but eventually knew it very well.
Paris 1900.
"How madly busy all the little people are, bussing over the planet, and for what? How nice it is to go to sleep. I am going to bed. P.S. I think it is an intellectual crime to wear long skirts in the streets."