Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all.

all is in a man’s hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most....

he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no faith in those dreams and was only tantalising himself by their hideous but daring recklessness.

There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

“poverty is not a vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that’s even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary—never—no one.

That’s why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!”

Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?

For I can feel it all.... And the whole of that heavenly day of my life and the whole of that evening I passed in fleeting dreams of how I would arrange it all, and

for it’s not merry-making I seek but tears and tribulation!...

“What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind—then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.”