Dosto Quotes

1. "The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm."
Author: Anaïs Nin

2. "And, pointing a trembling finger at Bonetti-Alderighi, with an expression of indignation and a quasi-castrato voice, he launched into the climax:Ah, so you, Mr. Commissioner, actually believed such a groundless accusation? Ah, I feel so insulted and humiliated! You're accusing me of an act - no, indeed, a crime that, if true, would warrant a severe punishment! As if I were a common idiot or gambler! That journalist must be possessed to think of such a thing!"End of climax. The inspector inwardly congratulated himself. He had managed to utter a statement using only titles of novels by Dostoyevsky. Had the comissioner noticed? Of course not! The man was ignorant as a goat!"
Author: Andrea Camilleri

3. "[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama."
Author: Bart D. Ehrman

4. "Tell it, Fanny. About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky. Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson about the desire that stir in the heart. Speak like Remy de Gourmont and Dostoevsky and Stevie Crane, like Schopenhauer and Dreiser and Isaiah; speak like all the great questioners whose tongues have wagged and whose hearts have burned with questions. He will listen bewilderedly and, perhaps, only perhaps, understand for a moment the dumb pathos of your eyes."
Author: Ben Hecht

5. "Dostoyevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs. A young man sits in one."
Author: Bruce Robinson

6. "Despite Langdon's six-foot frame and athletic build, Anderson saw none of the cold, hardened edge he expected from a man famous for surviving an explosion at the Vatican and a manhunt in Paris. This guy eluded the French police…in loafers? He looked more like someone Anderson would expect to find hearthside in some Ivy League library reading Dostoyevsky."
Author: Dan Brown

7. "This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others."
Author: David Foster Wallace

8. "As Dostoevski said: 'Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams."
Author: Dorothy Day

9. "Tout Occidental tourmenté fait penser à un héros dostoïevskien qui aurait un compte en banque."
Author: Emil Cioran

10. "Cea mai mare întâlnire din viata mea: Bach. Dupa el, Dostoievski; apoi scepticii greci, apoi Buddha... pe urma, dar ce mai conteaza ce vine pe urma..."
Author: Emil Cioran

11. "„Viata intensa" secatuieste deopotriva trupul si spiritul. Maestri în arta de a gîndi împotriva lor însisi, Nietzsche, Baudelaire si Dostoievski ne-au învatat sapunem pret pe risc, sa nascocim noi suferinte, sa dobîndim existenta prin ruperea de propria fiinta. Iar ceea ce în ochii marelui chinez era simbol al decaderii,exercitiu al imperfectiunii, constituie pentru noi unica modalitate de a ne apartine, de a ne regasi pe noi însine."
Author: Emil Cioran

12. "Bach, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Dostoievski si Nietzsche sunt singurul argument împotriva monoteismului."
Author: Emil Cioran

13. "Shakespeare si Dostoievski î?i lasa în suflet un regret chinuitor: acela de a nu fi sfânt sau criminal. Cele doua forme ale autodistrugerii"
Author: Emil Cioran

14. "Qui pourrait écrire le dialogue des saints? Un Shakespeare frappé d'innocence ou un Dostoievski exilé dans quelque Sibérie céleste. Toute ma vie je roderai dans les parages des saints...Il fut un temps où l'on pouvait s'adresser n'importe quand à un Dieu accueillant qui entrerrait vos soupirs dans son néant. Inconsoles, nous le sommes aujourd'hui faute d'avoir à qui confesser nos tourments. Comment douter que ce monde ait été autrefois en Dieu? L'Histoire se partage entre un autrefois où les hommes se sentaient attirés par le néant vibrant de la Divinité et un aujourd'hui où le rien du monde est privé de souffle divin."
Author: Emil Cioran

15. "Me crié con Lovecraft, Doyle, y Asimov. Fui educado por VíctorHugo, Dumas, y Dickens. Mis mejores amigos fueron Kafka, Poe, yKing. Dostoyevsky y Nietzsche me ayudaron a forjar el carácter.Baudelaire, Sade, y Wilde estimularon mis sentidos."
Author: Erick Cano

16. "Osjetila se pomalo izdanom i tužnom, ali u taj mah na vidiku se pojavio golemi pokretni predmet. Bilo je to veliko stablo kestena u punom cvatu koje su vozili na Champs-Elysees, privezano na velikom kamionu, koje se naprosto treslo od smijeha - kao kakva ljupka osoba koja se našla u nedostojanstvenom položaju, ali svejedno zna kako nije ništa izgubila od svoje ljupkosti. Promatrajuci stablo s uživanjem, Rosemary se poistovjetila s njime, i veselo se s njime smijala, i sve se odjednom opet cinilo prekrasnim."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

17. "It is a pity that there was no Dostoevsky living near this most interesting decadent [Jesus], I mean someone with an eye for the distinctive charm that this sort of mixture of sublimity, sickness, and childishness has to offer."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "The poor little thing, she'd saved this student's letter as a treasure and had run to fetch this precious treasure of hers, not wanting me to leave without knowing that she too was the object of sincere, honest love, and that someone exists who had spoken to her respectfully. Probably that letter was fated to lie in her box without results. But that didn't matter; I'm sure that she'll guard it as a treasure her whole life, as her pride and vindication; and now, at a moment like this, she remembered it and brought it out to exult naively before me, to raise her self in my eyes, so that I could see it for myself and could also think well of her."? Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

19. "Dostoevski was on to something. You are the path you choose. You are what your vocation is."
Author: Giovanni Ribisi

20. "...my longing was for Russia...Not Soviet Russia. But nineteenth-century Russia, the Russia of Dostoevsky's saintly prostitutes and Alyosha; of Tolstoy's Pierre; and Aksionov, the sufferer in "God Sees the Truth But Waits." A country where the characters in books were allowed to ask one another the questions: How must I live to be happy? What is goodness? Why does man suffer? What is to be done?"
Author: Guy Vanderhaeghe

21. "But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me."
Author: Haruki Murakami

22. "Novalis and Dostoyevsky, awaited me just as do the mother, or the wife, the children, maids, dogs and cats in the case of more sensible people."
Author: Hermann Hesse

23. "Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words, "Dear God, life is hell." Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the statue of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, "Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love." He started to write Dostoevski's name under the inscription, but saw—with fright that ran through his whole body—that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book."
Author: J.D. Salinger

24. "It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky."
Author: James Baldwin

25. "All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake."
Author: Jean Rhys

26. "Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher."
Author: John Banville

27. "We move through a course on Dostoevsky or Poe as we move through a mildly good cocktail party...Art...is less like a cocktail party thank a tank of shark."
Author: John Gardner

28. "Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell.(in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)"
Author: Joseph Brodsky

29. "For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life anymore? Teenagers. They were the only ones who were preoccupied with existential issues, and as a result there was something puerile and immature about them, and hence it was doubly impossible for adults with their sense of propriety intact to deal with them. However, this is not so strange for we never feel more strongly and passionately about life than in our teenage years, when we step into the world for the first time, as it were, and all our feelings are new feelings. So there they are, with their big ideas on small orbits, looking this way and that for an opportunity to launch them, as the pressure builds. And who is it they light upon sooner or later but Uncle Dostoevsky."
Author: Karl Ove Knausgård

30. "It's all like an ocean!" cried Dostoevski. I say it's all like cellophane."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

31. "Traut je 2001. godine, dok su se pripremale dagnje na buzaru, rekao da je život neporecivo izopacen. "Ali naši mozgovi dovoljno su veliki da nam omoguce da se prilagodimo neizbežnom burlesknom lakrdijašenju", nastavio je, "pomocu veštacki stvorenih epifanija poput ove." Mislio je na pripremanje dagnji na plaži pod zvezdanim nebom. "Ako ovo nije lepo, šta jeste?" rekao je on.Izjavio je da je klip kukuruza, kuvan u pari zajedno sa morskom travom, jastozima i dagnjama, rajska stvar. Dodao je "A zar sve ove dame veceras ne lice na andele?". Uživao je u kukuruzu i ženama kao idejama. Kukuruz nije mogao da jede zato što mu je gornja veštacka vilica bila klimava. Njegove duže veze sa ženama bile su katastrofalne. U jedinoj ljubavnoj prici u kojoj se ikada okušao, "Poljubi me opet", napisao je: "Ne postoji nikakav nacin da lepa žena u bilo kojem znacajnijem, dužem periodu ostane dostojna svog izgleda." Pouka na kraju te price glasi:"Muškarci su kreteni. Žene su psihopate."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

32. "Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps."
Author: Larry McMurtry

33. "Dostoevsky does not believe his own words, and he is trying to replace a lack of faith with "feeling" and eloquence."
Author: Lev Shestov

34. "Nije bilo zabavno biti razdražljiv i nemiran i usamljen i dosadivati se do neizdržljivosti jer je vec bila skoro ponoc, a jedan se prijezira vrijedan grubijan uopce nije udostojao doci. Nije bilo zabavno niti znati da je bolje što nije došao, a opet ga željeti ovdje i mrziti sebe zbog te želje."
Author: Loretta Chase

35. "Cesto smo obijesni, lakomisleni, površni prema sebi i drugima, ali kad se nademo na rubu ponora, na rubu propasti, okom u oko s nedostojnosti koja nas zove da odlucimo, tada se probudi dobro i mi se dignemo u visine."
Author: Marija Jurić Zagorka

36. "Andras Riedlmayer described a colleague who survived the siege of Sarajevo. In the winter, the scholar and his wife ran out of firewood, and so began to burn their books for heat and cooking. 'This forces one to think critically,' Riedlmayer remembered his friend saying. 'One must prioritize. First you burn old college textbooks, which you haven't read in thirty years. Then there are the duplicates. But eventually, you're forced to make tougher choices. Who burns today: Dostoevsky or Proust?' I asked Riedlmayer if his friend had any books left when the war was over. 'Oh yes,' he replied, his face lit by a flickering smile. 'He still had many books. Sometimes, he told me, you look at the books and just choose to go hungry."
Author: Matthew Battles

37. "Zar ne vidiš koliko mi je važno...? Da zatrpaš sobom prazninu što me plaši, da me izdvojiš izmedu svih ljudi, da zaboraviš predrasude i zamišljeno nepotrebno dostojanstvo, da pošalješ do davola sve pametne postupke, jer nisu pametni, da me uvjeriš kako mi daješ sebe cijelu u zamjenu za ono što gubim, ili da se praviš da je tako, da me obmaneš dok se ne naviknem na život, jer ovo što je sad, to nije život, vec sjecanje i cekanje"
Author: Meša Selimović

38. "I'd say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God's existence in Dostoevsky."
Author: Michel Houellebecq

39. "Dígame, ¿es que para convencerse de que Dostoievski es un escritor, es necesario pedirle su carnet? Coja cinco páginas cualesquiera de alguna de sus novelas y se convencerá sin necesidad de carnet de que es escritor. ¡Y me sospecho que nunca tuvo carnet!"
Author: Mikhail Bulgakov

40. "Frumusetea,dupa cuvintele lui Dostoievski,va salva lumea,si nu mai intelegem ce inseamna <>.Ce sa salvezi,cand traim in imanenta si aleatoriu?"
Author: Mircea Cărtărescu

41. "One must go to Dostoievsky who experienced on occasion ecstatic epileptic auras to which he attached momentous significance, to find an adequate historical parallel. "There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony ... a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly …"
Author: Oliver Sacks

42. "Reading a book about something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives you the impression that you are doing what you are only thinking about doing. It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of our imagination instead of the real world, to fall in love with the idea of becoming a saint and loving God and neighbor instead of doing the actual work, because the idea makes no demands on you. It is like a book on a shelf. But, as Dostoyevsky says, 'love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams' (The Brothers Karamazov)."
Author: Peter Kreeft

43. "Back when George W. Bush was identifying his Axis of Evil, it struck me that a longer and more instructive list could be compiled of the Axis of the Humiliated (or Insulted and Injured, to borrow from Dostoevsky)."
Author: Serge Schmemann

44. "Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?' Daved asked me once.I explained that there was a line. 'If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and--'All right!'All books are in some way about other books.'I get it!"
Author: Steve Toltz

45. "Two kinds of writers. Those who think this life is all there is, and want to describe everything: the fall, the battle, the accouchement, the horse-race. That is, Tolstoy. And those who think this life is a kind of testing-ground (for what we don't know — to see how much pleasure + pain we can bear or what pleasure + pain are?) and want to describe only the essentials. That is, Dostoyevsky. The two alternatives. How can one write like T. after D.? The task is to be as good as D. — as serious spiritually, + then go on from there."
Author: Susan Sontag

46. "Od vseh navad, ki jih ima sodobni clovek, je prebiranje dnevnega casopisa gotovo ena najslabših. Zjutraj, ko je glava najbolj odprta, se vanjo vsuje zlo, kar ga je prejšnji dan pridelal svet. V preteklosti je zadostovalo, da nisi bral casnikov, pa si bil rešen. Danes to ni vec mogoce; obstajajo mediji in dovolj je, da jih vklopiš za sekundo, pa te zlo že naskoci in prodre vate."
Author: Susanna Tamaro

47. "When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired."
Author: Tadashi Shoji

48. "Sretan je, cak i kad strepi, svaki onaj kome je Bog dao dušu dostojnu ljubavi i nesrece! Ko na ovoj dvostrukoj svjetlosti nije vidio stvari ovog svijeta i ljudsko srce, taj nije vidio ništa istinito i ništa ne zna."
Author: Victor Hugo

49. "Dostoevski's The Double is his best work though an obvious and shameless imitation of Gogol's "Nose."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

50. "The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity."
Author: Wendy Lesser

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