- Although Pulcheria Alexandrovna was forty-three, she still showed traces of her former beauty and seemed much younger than her years. This is generally true of women who remain serene in spirit, fresh in their impressions, and spontaneously warmhearted right to the edge of old age. One might add that in this way, and only in this way, they retain their beauty in old age too.
- For broad understanding and deep feeling, you need pain and suffering. I believe really great men must experience great sadness in the world.
- He looked at Sonia and sensed how much her love was on him; strangely, it suddenly felt weary and painful to be loved like that--a strange and terrible sensation!
- You must accept suffering and redeem yourself by it; that's what you must do.
- I killed for myself, myself alone.
- Did I kill the old hag? No, not the old hag--I killed myself!
- Go now. Go this very moment, and stand at the crossroads; bow down, and first kiss the earth which you have defiled; then bow down to the whole world, to the four points on the compass, and say aloud, for all men to hear: 'I have killed!' Then God will send you life again.
- You know what kind of man I think you are? You're the kind of man who would stand there and smile at his torturers while they were tearing out his guts--if only he could find faith or a god.
- What did they amount to, all those torments! Everything--even his crime, even sentence and exile--seemed to him now, in his first outburst of feeling, strange and superficial, as though it had not actually happened to him...Life replaced logic, and in his consciousness something quite different now had to elaborate and articulate itself.
- This is the beginning of a new story, though; the story of a man's gradual renewal and rebirth, of his gradual transition from one world to another, of his acquaintance with a new reality of which he had previously been completely ignorant.
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