Dostoyevsky

"Only look about you: blood is being spilt in the streams, and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground, 1864 (via militantsnoozer)

toniiu:

Like the discovery of love, like the discovery of the sea, the discovery of Dostoevsky marks an important date in one’s life. This usually occurs in adolescence; maturity seeks out more serene writers.
—Jorge Luis Borges, prologue to Demons

Like the discovery of love, like the discovery of the sea, the discovery of Dostoevsky marks an important date in one’s life. This usually occurs in adolescence; maturity seeks out more serene writers.

—Jorge Luis Borges, prologue to Demons

"… And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations— and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding bloodshed"

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground (via daplaney)

"Everyone in the world is good, every one of them. The world is a good place. We may be bad, but the world is a good place. We’re bad and good, both bad and good…"

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (via outofthedarkness)

"I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot (via ru2)

"I was so used to thinking and imagining everything from books, and to picturing everything in the world to myself as I had devised it beforehand in my dreams"

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground (via wakeupnietzsche)

"I often used to think I was like Raskolnikov, except I never met Sonia."

— Ushikawa in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (via savanna)

"Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It’s simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything."

— Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment. (via taiamadeleine)

"In words you may say and imply anything you like; but to decide, to begin, and to in fact carry through — no, that, I tell you, is character!"

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Adolescent (via mecham)

"The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (via outofthedarkness)

"Many times I’ve asked myself whether there is anything in the world that could crush my frantic, indecent appetite for life, and have decided that it looks as though nothing of that sort exists."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via fromtheinsight)

"If you run after two hares, you will catch neither."

— Russian Proverb, as quoted in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. (via internalpolicy)

jpdwilson:

Fyodor #Dostoevsky (Taken with Instagram at Barnes & Noble Booksellers)

"He lay like that for a very long time. Occasionally he seemed to wake up, and in those moments noticed that night had come long ago, yet it did not occur to him to get up. Finally he noticed light, as if it were already daytime. He was lying on his back on the sofa, still stupefied from his recent oblivion. Terrible, desperate screams came to him sharply from the street—which, by the way, he heard under his window every night between two and three o’clock. They were what wakened him now. “Ah! So the drunks are coming out of the taverns,” he thought, “it’s past two.” And suddenly he jumped up as if someone had torn him from the sofa. “What! Past two already!” He sat down on the sofa and—remembered everything! Suddenly, in an instant, he remembered everything!"

— Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (via liberumarbitriumindifferentiae)