Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

It’s because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing.

He had counted them once when he had been lost in dreams.

“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.”

thrust the truth away with both hands, until the man they deck out in false colours puts a fool’s cap on them with his own hands.

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

“When reason fails, the devil helps!”

in my opinion, the crudest charlatanism; it discusses the question, ‘Is woman a human being?’ And, of course, triumphantly proves that she is.

But I swear I judge her intellectually, simply from the metaphysical point of view;

But if one looks at men in all ways — are there many good ones left?

here you have the end of the world, an anchorage, a quiet haven, the navel of the earth, the three fishes that are the foundation of the world, the essence of pancakes, of savoury fish-pies, of the evening samovar, of soft sighs and warm shawls, and hot stoves to sleep on — as snug as though you were dead, and yet you’re alive — the advantages of both at once!

But you’ve only to assume that I, too, am a man et nihil humanum... in a word, that I am capable of being attracted and falling in love (which does not depend on our will), then everything can be explained in the most natural manner. The question is, am I a monster, or am I myself a victim? And what if I am a victim?

Everything, even his crime, his sentence and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an external, strange fact with which he had no concern. But he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed anything consciously; he was simply feeling.