“…there are people who feel very deeply, but are somehow held down by force of weight…”“…take the example of adults who go to the theater: at the theater the adventures of all kinds of heroes are also represented, sometimes with robbers and scenes of marital conflict-- so is not that really the same thing, in its own way as it were? Young people who play at marital conflict in their hours of recreation, or who play at robbers…they are, after all, also engendering a kind of art, and a need for art is being engendered in their young souls, and these games are sometimes even more harmoniously composed than the spectacles one may see at the theater, the only difference being that people go to the theater to see actors, while here the young folk are themselves the actors…”
“it appeared that the entire problem with his character was that he had a somewhat higher opinion of himself than his real merits would permit.”
“…then I suddenly took it into my head that the girl was tenderly disposed towards me-- my heart caught fire at such a dream. I later perceived and fully realized that it was possible I had loved her with such passion not at all, but had simply revered her exalted intellect and character, something I could have hardly failed to do…wretched and dreadful did it seem to have to say goodbye to the temptations…”
“…also something more, gentlemen of the jury, something that clamors in the soul, hammers untiringly in the mind, poisoning his heart to death; that something is conscience, gentlemen of the jury, its judgment, its terrible gnawing!”
“…with many hopes, though he knew not of what, expecting much, far too much, of life…”
*all quotations from Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov