Strange Quote of the Day: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. ‘From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life.”

Only two people? I asked.

—from a letter to a friend, recalling a visit with Charles Dickens,
recounted in Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

2 thoughts on “Strange Quote of the Day: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  1. YOU MANIAC! YOU QUOTED IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU!

    Well, could have been worse. You did threaten us with Finney.

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