Mark André ’s Reviews > White Nights > Status Update

My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of
a man's life?

And then when we parted she gave me her hand and said, looking at me
candidly: "We shall always be together, shan't we?"

I was thinking about you," she said after a minute's silence. "You are
so kind that I should be a stone if I did not feel it. Do you know what
has occurred to me now? I was comparing you two. Why isn't he you? Why isn't he like you? He is not as good as you, though I love him more than you.

"No, no!" Nastenka interrupted, laughing. "I don't only want sensible
advice, I want warm brotherly advice, as though you had been fond of me
all your life!"

"Agreed, Nastenka, agreed!" I cried delighted; "and if I had been fond
of you for twenty years, I couldn't have been fonder of you than I am
now."

And meanwhile the soul longs and craves for something else! And in vain the dreamer rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart by the rekindled fire, and to rouse up in it again all that was so sweet, that touched his heart, that set his blood boiling, drew tears from his eyes, and so luxuriously deceived him!

. . . fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun, and overcasts with depression . . .

. . . Nastenka: for at times such misery comes over me, such misery.... Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which are awful!

Now that I sit beside you and talk to you it is strange for me to think
of the future, for in the future--there is loneliness again, again this
musty, useless life; and what shall I have to dream of when I have been
so happy in reality beside you! Oh, may you be blessed, dear girl, for
not having repulsed me at first, for enabling me to say that for two
evenings, at least, I have lived."

Why, yes, yes," answered Nastenka, "that's the point. Listen. You
describe it all splendidly, but couldn't you perhaps describe it a
little less splendidly? You talk as though you were reading it out of a
book."

with the expression of an unhappy kitten treacherously captured, roughly handled, frightened and subjected to all sorts of indignities by children, till, utterly crestfallen, it hides away from them under a chair in the dark, and there must needs at its leisure bristle up, spit, and wash its insulted face with both paws, and long afterwards look angrily at life and nature, and even at ... the sympathetic housekeeper?