My Mousehole

Reading this book is like constantly stabbing at my own heart. Even when I was reading Camus' The Stranger, i didn't feel as terrible as when I was reading this book. How could Dostoyevsky wrote such a book, if he wasn't the underground man? The suffering is indeed personal, but immense, and universal. I read the exact book as the picture shown above, Signet Classic version, which included other short stories by Dostoyevsky. So far, I love everything from I've read in this book. Now I gotta read more Dostoyevsky - The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed, everything really.



These are quotes for you to get an idea:
1) "I am a sick man.. I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man."

2) "Yes, sir, an intelligent man in the nineteenth century must be, is morally obliged to be, principally a characterless creature; a man possessing character, a man of action, is fundamentally a limited creature."

3) "the most intense pleasures occur in despair.."

4) "There, in its disgusting, stinking underground, our offended, crushed, and ridiculed mouse immediately plunges into cold, malicious, and, above all, everlasting spitefulness."

5) "Oh, if I had done nothing simply out of laziness! Heavens, how I would have respected myself then. I would have respected myself because I would at least have been capable of being lazy; there would have at least have been in my one positive quality, as it were, in which I could have believed in myself. Question: Who is he? Answer: A loafer. After all, it would have been pleasant to hear that about oneself!"

6) "For though your mind is active enough, your heart is darkened with corruption, and without a pure heart there can be no full or genuine sensibility."

7) "Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything."

8) "Let us suppose, gentlemen, that man is not stupid. (As a matter of fact, it cannot possibly be said that man is stupid, if only from the one consideration that if he is, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful. Phenomenally ungrateful. I’m even inclined to believe that the best definition of man is—a creature who walks on two legs and is ungrateful."

9) "And, really, here am I already putting the idle question to myself—which is better: cheap happiness or exalted suffering? Well, which is better?"

10) "I've only taken to an extreme that which you haven't even dared to take halfway.."