the waking world is a dream

"I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness."

"Yes, man is a pliable animal—he must be so defined—a being who gets accustomed to everything!"

"It is a most dreadful, agonizing fear of something I cannot define, something unfathomable and non-existent in the normal course of events, but which may at any given moment materialize and confront me as an unquestionable, terrible, ghastly and implacable reality, making a mockery of all evidence of reason."

“I thank you, oh God, for everything, everything, for your wrath and for your mercy!… For your sun too, which has now cast its light on us after the storm! I thank you for this moment of joy! No matter that we are humiliated, no matter that we are insulted, but we are together again – and let, let the proud and the arrogant people who have humiliated and insulted us gloat over their triumph! Let them cast stones at us! Have no fear, Natasha… We shall go hand in hand, and I shall say to them, ‘This is my dearly beloved daughter, my daughter without sin whom you have humiliated and insulted, but whom I love and bless for ever and ever!…’”

"A base nature subjected to tyranny will always tyrannize others as soon as it has secured its own release."

"but it seems to me there’s far more good in every person than appears on the surface."

"He is half a corpse; he's only the memory of a man; they've forgotten to bury him! Why, his eye is made of glass, and his leg of cork, and he goes on wires; he even talks on wires!"

"Give me your hand, Annetta, my dear child. I am no worthier, no better than you. You can’t harm me with your presence, for I too, I too am a sinner."

"Enough, enough shedding tears over other people's sorrows! Save them for a dark day when you are lonely and cast down and there is no one with you!"

"Sorrow is concealed in gilded palaces, and there’s no escaping it."

"To whom should I write letters? To whom should I send these missives? Whom should I call “my darling”? To whom should I apply that name of endearment? Where, too, could I find you? When you are gone, Barbara, I shall die—for certain I shall die, for my heart cannot bear this misery. I love you as I love the light of God."

Fyodor Dostoevsky's entire body of works.