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

Katya, I think, was prepared for a lengthy discussion on the question which of them would make Alyosha happy and which of them ought to give him up. But after Natasha’s answer she understood at once that everything had long been settled and there was nothing to discuss. With her pretty lips half parted, she gazed with sorrow and perplexity at Natasha, still holding her hand.

She was dressed all in white that morning. Her dark brown hair was brushed back smoothly and gathered in a heavy knot. I particularly liked that way of doing her hair.

A rage so furious seized the old man that he almost had a heart attack.

... the first heartfelt lines had rapidly, after these opening lines, degenerated into quite a different feeling: the old man began to reproach his daughter, describing her crime to her in vigorous hues, indignantly remind­ ing her of her obstinacy, accusing her of heartlessness, of not having once given a single thought to what she had done to her father and mother.

They say that the well-fed cannot understand the hungry, but I would add that the hungry do not always understand the hungry.

Kind people don’t wait till things are done for them, Nellie. They like to help people who need it, without that. Come, Nellie, there are lots of kind people in the world. It’s just your misfortune that you haven’t met any and didn’t meet them when you needed them.”

... as grave and majestic as the ghost in Hamlet.

... if it were possible for everyone of us to describe all his secret thoughts, without hesitat­ing to disclose what he is afraid to tell and would not on any account tell others, what he is afraid to tell his best friends, and what he is even at times afraid to con­fess to himself, the world would be filled with such a stench that we should all be suffocated.

If there was time I’d play you Beethoven’s third con­certo. That’s what I’m playing now. All those feelings are in it ... just as I feel now.

I kept looking at her with the greatest interest. I was eager to get to know this strange girl. She was quite a child, but a strange child, a child of convictions, with steadfast principles, and with a pas­sionate, innate love of goodness and justice. If one really might call her a child she belonged to that class of thinking children, who are fairly numerous in our Rus­sian families.