...he watched them with curious eyes and forgot about them before they had vanished from his sight..

...In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truthlike and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system.

…. At first – long before indeed – he had been much occupied with one question; why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces? He had come gradually to many different and curious conclusions, and in his opinion the chief reason lay not in the material impossibility of concealing the crime, as in the criminal himself. Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease, developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the moment of the crime, and for longer or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like other disease. The question of whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.

…. Listen to me, let me tell you, that you are all a set of babbling, posing idiots! If you’ve any little trouble you brood over it like a hen over an egg. And you are plagiarists even in that! There isn’t a sign of independent life in you! You are made of spermaceti ointment and you’ve lymph in your veins instead of blood. I don’t believe in any one of you! In any circumstance the first thing for all of you is to be unlike a human being! Stop! .. And if you were an original instead of a translation

It began with a social doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organization and nothing more, and nothing morel no other causes admitted.. .. Nothing is admitted – I am wrong. I’ll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is the “influence of environment” and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organized, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That’s why they instinctively dislike history, nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it, and they explain it all as stupidity! That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul!. The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rule of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made if India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery – it wants life, it hasn’t completed its vital process, it’s too soon for the graveyard! You can’t skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That’s the easiest solution of the problem! It’s seductively clear and you mustn’t think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!

Avdotya Romanovna was remarkably good looking; she was tall, strikingly well-proportioned, strong and self reliant – the latter quality was apparent in every gesture, though it did not in the least detract from the grace and softness of her movements... Her hair was dark brown, a little lighter than her brother’s; there was a proud light in her almost black eyes and yet at times a look of extraordinary kindness. She was pale, but it was a healthy pallor; her face was radiant with freshness and vigour. Her mouth was rather small; the full red lower lip projected a little as did her chin; it was the only irregularity in her beautiful face, but it gave it a peculiarly individual and haughty expression. Her face was always more serious and thoughtful than gay; but how well smiles, how well youthful, light-hearted, irresponsible, laughter suited her face! It was natural enough that a warm, open, simple-hearted, honest giant like Razumihin, who had never seen any one like her and was not quite sober at the time, should lose his head immediately. Besides, as chance would have it, he saw Dounia for the first time transfigured by her love for her brother and her joy at meeting him. Afterwards he saw her lower lip quiver with indignation at her brother’s insolent, cruel and ungrateful words – and his fate was sealed

Reason is the slave of passion, you know; why, probably, I was doing more harm to myself than anyone!

...I don’t know what to say. I didn’t want to go anywhere else. Marfa herself invited me to go abroad, seeing I was bored, but I’ve been abroad before, and always felt sick there. For no reason, but the sunrise, the bay of Naples, the sea – you look at them and it makes you sad. What’s revolting is that one is really sad! No, it’s better at home. Here at least one blames others for everything and excuses oneself.

...I wouldn’t earn money for candles. I ought to have studied, but I sold my books; and the dust lies an inch thick on the notebooks on my table. I preferred lying still and thinking. And I kept thinking… And I had dreams all the time, strange dreams of all sorts, no need to describe! Only then I began to fancy that… No, that’s not it! Again I am telling you wrong! You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid – and I know they are – yet I won’t be wiser? Then I saw, Sonia, that if one waits for everyone to get wiser it will take too long… Afterwards I understood that that would never come to pass, that men won’t change and that nobody can alter it and that it’s not worth wasting effort over it. Yes, that’s so. That’s the law of their nature, Sonia, that whoever is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. Anyone who is greatly daring is right in their eyes. He who despises most things will be a lawgiver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the right! So it has been till now and so it will be. … that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare!

...If it had been possible to escape to some solitude, he would have thought himself lucky, even if he had to spend his whole life there. But although he had almost always been by himself of late, he had never been able to feel alone. Sometimes he walked out of the town on to the high road, once he had even reached a little wood, but the lonelier the place was, the more he seemed to be aware of an uneasy presence near him. It did not frighten him, but greatly annoyed him, so that he made haste to return to the town, to mingle with the crowd, to enter restaurants and taverns, to walk in busy thoroughfares. There he felt easier and even more solitary.

...Not to speak of the fact that there are cases when women are very, very glad to be insulted in spite of all their show of indignation. There are instances of it with everyone; human beings in general, indeed, greatly love to be insulted, have you noticed that? But it’s particularly so with women. One might even say it’s their only amusement.

...With all of Donia’s natural aversion and in spite of my invariably gloomy and repellent aspect – she did at last feel pity for me, pity for a lost soul. And if once a girl’s heart is moved to pity, it’s more dangerous than anything. She is bound to want to ‘save him’, to bring him to his senses, and lift him up and draw him to nobler aims, and restore him to new life and usefulness, - well we all know how far such dreams can go… She is simply thirsting to face some torture for some one, and if she can’t get her torture, she’ll throw herself out of a window.

...You are the worst sinner. and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.

She looked with sick but intent and penetrating eyes at Sonia.

A strange period began for Raskolnikov: it was as though a fog had fallen upon him and wrapped him in a dreary solitude from which there was no escape. Recalling that period long after, he believed that his mind had been clouded at times, and that it had continued so, with intervals, till the final catastrophe.

It was a dark and stifling evening. Threatening storm clouds came over the sky about ten o’clock. There was a clap of thunder, and the rain came down like a waterfall. The water fell not in drops, but beat on the earth in streams.