There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.

Here my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow, let them flow - they don't hurt anybody. They will dry Nastenka.

He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story -- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.

Without God all things are permitted.

Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor

if she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me--even then I would have jumped!

My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.