Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Yes, we shall require them to work, but in their free time we shall devise for them a life such as a child’s game, with children’s songs in chorus and innocent dances. Oh, we shall even allow them to sin, for they are weak and feeble, and for having been allowed to sin they will love us in the way that children do. We shall tell them that every sin
... See moreFyodor Dostoevsky • The Karamazov Brothers (Oxford World's Classics)
for Russian criminals still have faith.
Larissa Volokhonsky • The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue
His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purified and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation.
Vladimir Nabokov • Pale Fire (Vintage International)
The title of this book is borrowed from Dostoevsky’s weirdest novel, The Demons, formerly translated as The Possessed, which narrates the descent into madness of a circle of intellectuals in a remote Russian province: a situation analogous, in certain ways, to my own experiences in graduate school.
Elif Batuman • The Possessed
He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point.