Sean Richmond

“Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal—such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: “But it actually happened.” Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“And there is no need to be troubled about times and seasons, for the secret of the times and seasons is in the wisdom of God, in His foresight, and His love. And what in human reckoning seems still afar off, may by the Divine ordinance be close at hand, on the eve of its appearance. And so be it, so be it!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels

“In that way (that is, with a view to the future) it is not the Church that should seek a definite position in the State, like’every social organization,’ or as ‘an organization of men for religious purposes’ (as my opponent calls the Church), but, on the contrary, every earthly State should be, in the end, completely transformed into the Church and should become nothing else but a Church, rejecting every purpose incongruous with the aims of the Church.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels