Quotes About Dostoyevsky

I was asked something about the economic problem of Communism. I answered, citing Dostoyevsky: "The problem of Communism is not an economic problem. The problem of Communism is the problem of atheism.

As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.

The man who owned the bookstore was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seamen who had been torpedoed in the north Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen, and a home. He learned about life at 16, first from Dostoyevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

Dostoyevsky developed the theory that the worst torture one could possibly devise would be to force someone to endlessly perform an obviously pointless task.

Once, while serving time in exile at a Siberian prison camp, Dostoyevsky developed the theory that the worst torture one could possibly devise would be to force someone to endlessly perform an obviously pointless task. Even

I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.

Dostoyevsky was an influence - what's his name, the saintly priest in 'The Brothers Karamazov,' Father Zossima... 'Kiss the earth,' he'd say. Love everything.

A tenth of Dostoyevsky is plenty for a seventh grader, I think.

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy –that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man's soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.

Your eyes flashed fire into my soul. I immediately read the words of Dostoyevsky and Karl Marx, and in the words of Albert Schweitzer, I FANCY YOU!

These three people, Pascal, Blake, and Dostoyevsky, illustrate perfectly what I have long believed to be the case, that history consists of parables whereby God communicates in terms that the imagination rather than the mind, faith rather than knowledge, can grasp.

The critique of the domesticated Jesus has a long pedigree, perhaps the most notable being Dostoyevsky's chilling account of Jesus having the audacity to show up and disturb the machinations of the crusades in Seville (which, in fact, Jesus doesn't disturb at all precisely because his nonviolence can be so easily silenced).

I first read Dostoyevsky when I was 14 years old and was entranced. Dostoyevsky truly is a writer for 14-year-olds, and I mean that in the most approving way - approving of his energy, and rage, his endless pessimism, and endless innocence.

Her reaction was in character. Svetlana was at heart a gambler. Throughout her life she would make a monumental decision entirely on impulse, and then ride the consequences with an almost giddy abandon. She always said her favorite story by Dostoyevsky was The Gambler.

When it's summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky. Put The Idiot in your lap or over your face, and you know where you are going to be for the afternoon.

Tolstoy was obsessed with truth, but only told it in his novels. Dostoyevsky, obsessed not with truth but with God, was a compulsive gambler. He pawned his watch so many times that his saintly second wife said she never knew what time it was.

The Slavs aren't unintelligent of course, just emotionally unstable, liable to great heights and great depths. That is what science tells one. Look at Tchaikovsky. Look at Dostoyevsky.

I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.

White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.

I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Dostoyevsky had come to believe that "to love man like oneself, according to the commandment of Christ, is impossible. The law of personality on Earth binds. The ego stands in the way." It is only in the afterlife that the "the law of personality" could be decisively overcome.

are still men, and not keyboards of pianos over which the hands of Nature may play at their own sweet will." Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letters from the Underworld

I have a thing about losers. Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws. Not that Dostoyevsky's characters don't generate phatos, but they're flawed in ways that don't come across as faults. And while I'm on the subject, Tolstoy's characters' faults are so epic and out of scale, they're as static as backdrops.