Svidrigaïlov Quotes

There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery.

In flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless.

“Did you suppose I was such a monster, such a reactionary, such a slave driver?”

She! Would you believe it, she talks of the silliest trifles and—man is a strange creature—it makes me angry.

I sat still and thought ‘he is doing it out of revenge,’ because we had a violent quarrel just before his death.

‘Go away, you scamp!’ He turned and went out, and never came again.

“We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”

Wasn’t I right in saying that we were birds of a feather?”

A thief steals and knows he is a scoundrel, but I’ve heard of a gentleman who broke open the mail. Who knows, very likely he thought he was doing a gentlemanly thing!

I love you too.... I love you beyond everything....

It’s my personal conviction that you are perfectly right—violence is hateful.

“There’s a sound of trees. How I dislike the sound of trees on a stormy night, in the dark! They give one a horrid feeling.”