SOURCE
ذكرياتها القديمة هي كل ما بقي لها الآن, أما ما تبقى فقد تبدد كالسحاب
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
RESOURCE
Found below in my comments to this post are more quotes by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Feel free to vote up the quotes in the comments that you like the most. Vote them all up if you like them equally :)
--you wouldn't have hurt me like this for nothing. So what have I done? How have I wronged you? Tell me.
A special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity "on a square yard of space.
In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position.
Because reading books and having them bound represent two enormously different stages of development. First, people gradually get used to reading, over centuries naturally, but they don't take care of their books and toss them around. Having books bound signifies respect for the book; it indicates that people not only love to read, but they view it an important occupation. Nowhere in Russia has that stage been reached. Europe has been binding its books for sometime.
إن الكذابين العريقين الذين ظلوا ظلوا طوال حياتهم يمثِّلون يبلغون أحياناً من عمق تقمصهم للدور الذي يمثلونه أنهم يرتعشون انفعالاَ ويبكون، رغم قدرتهم على أن يقولوا لأنفسهم في الوقت نفسه (أو بعد بضع دقائق): "أنت تكذب أيها الكاذب العريق! أنت تمثل حتى في هذه اللحظة، رغم غضبك "المقدس" ورغم هذه الدقيقة "المقدسة" من الغضب
An artist must know the reality he is depicting in its minutest detail. In my opinion we have only one shining example of that - Count Leo Tolstoy.
We are all privately agreed that it is better in books.
I hated my face, for example, found it odious, and even suspected that there was some mean expression in it, and therefore every time I came to work I made a painful effort to carry myself as independently as possible, and to express as much nobility as possible with my face. "let it not be a beautiful face," I thought, "but, to make up for that, let it be a noble, an expressive, and, above all, an extremely intelligent one." Yet I knew, with certainty and suffering, that i would never be able to express all those perfections with the face I had. The most terrible thing was that I found it positively stupid. And I would have been quite satisfied with intelligence. Let's even say I would even have agreed to a mean expression, provided only that at the same time my face be found terribly intelligent.
But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness.
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