Jacob Moore’s Reviews > The Brothers Karamazov > Status Update

"And what need did you have to 'lie,' as you put it?"

"Devil knows. Maybe in order to boast...well... about squandering so much money... Or maybe in order to forget about the money I had sewn up... yes, that's exactly why... ah, the devil... how many times must you ask me? So I lied, and that's it, I lied once and then I didn't want to correct it. Why does a man lie sometimes?"

The world says: "You have needs, therefore satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the noblest & richest men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them." ... Taking freedom to mean the increase of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate meaningless & foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, pleasure seeking, & self conceit

No, I cannot admit it. Brother," Alyosha said suddenly, his eyes beginning to flash, "you have asked just now if there is in the whole world a being who could & would have the right to forgive. But there is such a being, an he can forgive everything, forgive all and for all, because he himself gave his innocent blood for all & for everything. You've forgotten about him... it is on him the structure is being built."

I looked at this woman for 3 or 5 seconds, then, with terrible hatred -- the kind of hatred that is only a hairsbreadth from love, the maddest love!

Fyodor suddenly felt that that he had blurted out some absurd nonsense, and he wanted at once to prove to his listeners & above all to himself that what he had said was not nonsense at all. And though he knew perfectly well that with each word he would be adding more & more absurdities of the same sort to the nonsense he had already spoken, still he could not help himself & plunged headlong off the mountain.