crudestofwriter
05-18-2014, 06:58 PM
I found a Dostoyevsky quote online that I'd like to use in a book I'm working on, but no one included the source. Can any Dostoyevsky aficionados out there identify this for me?
“...There, in his foul, stinking cellar, our offended, down-trodden and ridiculed mouse immerses himself in cold, venomous and, chiefly, everlasting spite. For forty years on end he will remember the offence, down to the smallest and most shameful detail, constantly adding more shameful details of his own, maliciously teasing and irritating himself with his own fantasies. He himself will be ashamed of his fantasies, but nevertheless he will remember all of them, weighing them up and inventing all sorts of things that never happened to him, on the pretext that they too could have happened and he'll forgive nothing. Probably he'll start taking his revenge, but somehow in fits and starts, pettily, anonymously, from behind the stove, believing neither in his right to take revenge, nor in the success of his revenge and knowing beforehand that he will suffer one hundred times more from every single one of his attempts at revenge than the object of his revenge, who, most likely, won't give a damn.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“...There, in his foul, stinking cellar, our offended, down-trodden and ridiculed mouse immerses himself in cold, venomous and, chiefly, everlasting spite. For forty years on end he will remember the offence, down to the smallest and most shameful detail, constantly adding more shameful details of his own, maliciously teasing and irritating himself with his own fantasies. He himself will be ashamed of his fantasies, but nevertheless he will remember all of them, weighing them up and inventing all sorts of things that never happened to him, on the pretext that they too could have happened and he'll forgive nothing. Probably he'll start taking his revenge, but somehow in fits and starts, pettily, anonymously, from behind the stove, believing neither in his right to take revenge, nor in the success of his revenge and knowing beforehand that he will suffer one hundred times more from every single one of his attempts at revenge than the object of his revenge, who, most likely, won't give a damn.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky