Mark André ’s Reviews > The Insulted and the Injured > Status Update

We must put an end to this painful scene. This blind and savage outburst of unbridled jealousy shows me your character in quite a novel light.

Romancing, romancing,” the prince pronounced in an undertone, as though speaking to himself, “solitude, brooding, and novel-reading.

Love always passes, but incompatibility remains for ever.

Above all I want to use every means I can to rescue you from ruin in the circle to which you have so attached yourself, and to save you from your convictions.

“I try to employ as few hints as I can, whoever I am speaking to,” answered Natasha. “I always try, on the contrary, to be as outspoken as I can, .. .

The stranger kept grumbling and cursing the stairs as he climbed up, his language growing stronger and more violent as he pro­ceeded. Of course the staircase was narrow, filthy, steep and never lighted; but the language I heard on the third floor was such that I could never have ascribed it to the prince: the ascending gentleman was swearing like a trooper.

It was a grim story, one of those grim and poignant dramas which are so often played out unseen, almost mysterious, under the heavy sky of Petersburg, in the dark secret corners of the vast city, in the midst of the giddy ferment of life, of dull egoism, of clashing interests, of gloomy vice and secret crimes, in that seething hell of a senseless and abnormal life_ _

I was startled. The plot of a whole drama seemed to flash before my eyes.That poor woman dying in a cellar at the coffin-maker’s, her orphan child occasionally visiting the old grandfather who had cursed her mother, the queer crazed old man dying in the confectioner’s shop after his dog had died.

It often happens to me that I go and open a book to look up something, and become engrossed in my reading to the exclusion of everything else.

They’d scold me, but I’d say nothing on purpose. They’d beat me, but I wouldn’t speak, I wouldn’t speak. Let them beat me— I wouldn’t cry for anything. They’d be sick with anger because I wasn’t crying.