Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags.

fastidiousness

Raskolnikov was not used to crowds, and, as we said before, he avoided society of every sort, more especially of late. But now all at once he felt a desire to be with other people. Something new seemed to be taking place within him, and with it he felt a sort of thirst for company. He was so weary after a whole month of concentrated wretchedness and gloomy excitement that he longed to rest, if only for a moment, in some other world, whatever it might be; and, in spite of the filthiness of the surroundings, he was glad now to stay in the tavern.

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, honored sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary—never—no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible;

And the more I drink the more I feel it. 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!”

Moreover, in order to understand any man one must be deliberate and careful to avoid forming prejudices and mistaken ideas, which are very difficult to correct and get over afterward.

‘words are not deeds,’ and that, of course, is perfectly true.

For one she loves, for one she adores, she will sell herself! That’s what it all amounts to; for her brother, for her mother, she will sell herself! She will sell everything!

He felt a hammering in his head, and there was a darkness before his eyes.

With Razumihin he had got on, or, at least, he was more unreserved and communicative with him.

Another thing striking about Razumihin, no failure distressed him, and it seemed as though no unfavorable circumstances could crush him.

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truth-like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the

The question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.