cloz ’s Reviews > Notes from Underground > Status Update

Leave us to ourselves, without a book, and we'll immediately get confused, lost —we won't know what to join, what to hold to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect

Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what's more, you've taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves.

Go on, try giving us more independence, for example, unbind the hands of any one of us, broaden our range of activity, relax the supervision, and we ... but I assure you: we will immediately beg to be taken back under tutelage.

For we've reached a point where we regard real "living life" almost as labor, almost as service, and we all agree in ourselves that it's better from a book. And why do we sometimes fuss about, why these caprices, these demands of ours? We ourselves don't know why. It would be the worse for us if our capricious demands were fulfilled.

we've all grown unaccustomed to life, we're all lame, each of us more or less.

By tomorrow I'd have already dirtied her soul with myself and worn out her heart.

Such were my reveries as I sat at home that evening, barely alive from the pain in my soul.

At least I've felt ashamed all the while I've been writing this story: so it's no longer literature, but corrective punishment.

In my underground dreams as well, I never pictured love to myself otherwise than as a struggle; for me it always started from hatred and ended with moral subjugation, and afterwards I couldn't even picture to myself what to do with the subjugated object. And how is it inconceivable, if I had managed so to corrupt myself morally, had grown so unaccustomed to "living life,"

She understood from it all what a woman, if she loves sincerely, always understands before anything else— namely, that I myself was unhappy.

Shall the world go to hell, or shall I not have my tea? I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

Do you know that one can deliberately torment a person out of love?