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“Oh, if only you knew how many times I’ve fallen in love like that! …’

‘But how, with whom? …’

‘Why with nobody, with an ideal, with the one I see in my dreams. I create entire love stories in my dreams. Oh, you don’t know me!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“Tell me, how is it that we can't all be like brothers together ? Why is it that even the best of men always seem to hide something from other people and to keep something back ? Why not say straight out what is in one's heart, when one knows that one is not speaking idly ? As it is every one seems harsher than he really is, as though all were afraid of doing injustice to their feelings, by being too quick to express them.”
― Fiódor Dostoyevski, White Nights

“He thinks that this is a poor pitiful life, not foreseeing that for him too, maybe, sometime the mournful hour may strike, when for one day of that pitiful life he would give all his years of phantasy, and would give them not only for joy and for happiness, but without caring to make distinctions in that hour of sadness, remorse and unchecked grief. But so far that threatening has not arrived—he desires nothing, because he is superior to all desire, because he has everything, because he is satiated, because he is the artist of his own life, and creates it for himself every hour to suit his latest whim. And you know this fantastic world of fairyland is so easily, so naturally created! As though it were not a delusion! Indeed, he is ready to believe at some moments that all this life is not suggested by feeling, is not mirage, not a delusion of the imagination, but that it is concrete, real, substantial!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“I was walking and singing, because when I am happy I am sure to hum something to myself, like every other happy man who has neither friends nor good acquaintances and who in a joyful moment has nobody with whom he can share his joy.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights