Poor Folk and Other Stories Quotes

“Today I feel nothing but anguish, tedium, and sadness. It is simply that kind of day.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“You must not be angry with me for having been so sad yesterday; I was very happy, very content, but in my very best moments I am always for some reason sad.”
― Fydor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Why, an organ-grinder whom I met in Gorokhovaia Street would inspire more respect than they do, for at least he walks about all day, and suffers hunger—at least he looks for a stray, superfluous groat to earn him subsistence, and is, therefore, a true gentleman, in that he supports himself. To beg alms he would be ashamed; and, moreover, he works for the benefit of mankind just as does a factory machine. "So far as in me lies," says he, "I will give you pleasure." True, he is a pauper, and nothing but a pauper; but, at least he is an honourable pauper. Though tired and hungry, he still goes on working—working in his own peculiar fashion, yet still doing honest labour.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Whom should I call “my darling”? When you are gone, Barbara, I shall die—for certain I shall die, for my heart cannot bear this misery. I love you as I love the light of God; to you I have devoted my love in its entirety; only for you have I lived at all.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Dearest one, even to think of you is like medicine to my ailing soul. Though I suffer for you, I at least suffer gladly.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“As soon as ever I got to know you I began both to realise myself and to love you; for until you came into my life I had been a lonely man—I had been, as it were, asleep rather than alive. But the instant that YOU came into my life, you lightened the dark places in it, you lightened both my heart and my soul.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“I live for you alone; it is for your sake alone that I am still here.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Poor people are subject to fancies.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“The fact that I love you, and the fact that it is unwise of me to love you—very unwise.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“I wish to hold you to myself, for the reason that I cannot bear to part with you, and love you as my guardian angel.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“An infectious disease is indeed a misfortune, for now we poor and miserable folk must perforce keep apart from one another, lest the infection be increased.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Yet would it not be better, instead of letting the poor fellow die, to give him a cloak while yet he is ALIVE?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“I can feel just as the people in the book do, and find myself in positions precisely similar to them.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Though I am bound to you with my whole soul, and love you dearly and strongly and wholeheartedly, a bitter fate has ordained that that love should be all that I have to give—that I should be unable, by creating for you subsistence, to repay you for all your kindness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“When feeling sad, I always like to talk of something, for it acts upon me like medicine—I begin to feel easier as soon as I have uttered what is preying upon my heart.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“You have given me all, all that my tortured soul has for immemorial years been seeking!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Literature is a sort of picture—a sort of picture or mirror. It connotes at once passion, expression, fine criticism, good learning, and a document.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“He is a man of reputation, whereas I—well, I do not exist at all.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“It is difficult for my heart to express itself; still more difficult for it to forego self-expression.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Somehow I could not weep, though my heart seemed to be breaking.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“All today you have been in my thoughts; all today my heart has been yearning for you”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Man is sometimes a very strange being. By all the Saints, he will talk of doing things, yet leave them undone, and remain looking the kind of fool from whom may the Lord preserve us!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“To have to be so uncertain as to the future, to have to be unable to foretell what is going to happen, distresses me deeply.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Mortals who dwell in pain and sorrow might with reason envy the birds of heaven, which know not either.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Sometimes I have moments when I am glad to be alone – to be sad alone, depressed alone, without sharing my mood – and such moments are beginning to visit me more and more often. In my memories there is something I find inexplicable, something which absorbs me so instinctively and so powerfully that for several hours at a stretch I am oblivious to all that surrounds me and forget everything, everything that is in the present.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Poor folk are capricious – that is the way nature makes them. This is not the first time I have felt it. The poor man is a severe critic; he looks at God’s world from a different angle, he furtively sizes up each person he meets, looks about him with a troubled gaze, and listens carefully to every word he overhears – are people talking about him? Are they saying he is not much to look at, wondering about what he is feeling, what he is like from this point of view and that point of view? And Varenka, everyone knows that a poor man is worth less than an old rag, and cannot hope for respect from anyone, whatever they may write, those scribblers, whatever they may write! The poor man will remain the same as he has always been. And why will he remain the same? Because, according to their lights, the poor man must be turned inside out; he must have no privacy, no dignity of any kind!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“Do not be too cross with me for being so sad yesterday; I felt very good, very much at ease – but for some reason at those moments of my life when I feel best I am always sad. As for my crying, that was just nonsense; I myself do not know why I am forever crying. My emotions are painful and exasperating; I have a morbid sensibility. The sky was pale and cloudless, the sun was setting, the evening was quiet – all that – yet I do not know how it was: yesterday my mood made me experience everything as being painful and tormenting, so that my heart overflowed and my soul begged for tears.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories

“man is sometimes a strange creature, very strange. And saints above! He sometimes really gets carried away by the things he talks about! And what comes of that, what follows from it? Absolutely nothing follows from it, and what comes of it is such rubbish that the Lord preserve us from it! I am not angry, little mother;it is simply that it is very annoying to remember it all, annoying to think that I wrote such fanciful, stupid things to you. And I went to the office today such a strutting dandy, too; there was such a radiance in my heart. For no good reason I felt in a holiday mood; I felt cheerful! I set to work on my papers with zeal – but what came of that? When I looked around me a bit later, everything was just the same as before –grey and dingy. The same blotches of ink, the same desks and papers,and I, too, the same; as I had been, so exactly had I remained – so what had been the point of my flight on Pegasus? And what had been the cause of it all? The glimmer of sunshine and the bit of blue sky there had been? Was that it? And what kind of scents could there have been, when goodness only knows what may be lurking beneath our windows! All that was evidently the product of my foolish imaginings. After all, it does sometimes happen that a person goes astray in his feelings and writes down nonsense. It is caused by nothing other than excessive, stupid warmth of heart.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk and Other Stories