Quotes from Crime and Punishment

“On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.”

The opening sentence. Notice the abbreviated street names (S. Place, K. bridge). Dostoevsky is using the convention of Russian periodicals to make the setting feel half-real, half-allegorical. The young man is hot, hesitant, lodging in a garret: every detail is also a condition of his thought. The novel argues that ideas are not held in the head, they are held in a body that is hungry and cannot sleep.

“I wanted to find out then and quickly whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or not.”

Raskolnikov to Sonya, in the most direct statement of his motive. The two words doing the work are louse and step over. He has not killed to rob, or for revenge; he has killed to test a theory about himself. Dostoevsky's argument is that intellectual self-examination, severed from love, will always end at a corpse. The novel never lets the test produce a clean answer.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

Raskolnikov to Sonya, near the end. The sentence sounds noble. In context it is alarming: it is the philosophy that authorised the murder thirty chapters ago, returning unrepented. Dostoevsky is showing that conversion does not arrive in a single moment; the same man can be on his way to confession and still believe the structure that made him capable of the crime.

“I'll come back to you, only let me go!”

Raskolnikov to Sonya, after she has urged him to confess. He cannot do what she asks; he cannot quite refuse her either. The line is one of the novel's hinges: Sonya does not argue him into faith, she lets him keep delaying, and the delays themselves become the path. Dostoevsky's Christianity is not converting; it is waiting with someone until they are ready.

“What should I do without God?”

Sonya's reply when Raskolnikov asks how she bears her life. The line is so simple it is easy to misread as platitude. Dostoevsky has spent forty pages establishing what Sonya endures (prostitution to feed her younger siblings, an alcoholic father, a stepmother dying of tuberculosis); the question is sincere because the situation is. The answer is also sincere: faith is not a comfort to her, it is the only thing structurally holding her up.

“You are a great sinner, that's true, but your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

Sonya to Raskolnikov when he confesses to her. She does not say the murder was the worst part. She says destroying himself for nothing was. Dostoevsky is doing something startling here: a teenage prostitute, in a single sentence, restates the entire Christian moral framework as concerned not with the act but with the self the act betrayed.

“Petersburg is the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world.”

Although this exact sentence is from Notes from Underground, English readers tend to attach it to Crime and Punishment, where Petersburg is itself almost a character. The point is that Petersburg was built by decree, on a swamp, in defiance of the Russian instinct for sprawl. Raskolnikov's theory has the same quality: abstract, premeditated, imposed on a body that resists it. Dostoevsky pairs city and protagonist deliberately.

“Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”

Raskolnikov to himself before going to the police. The passage is a quotation he has read somewhere, recycled in his head as a defence against suicide. Dostoevsky is making the argument that the will to live, when severed from any belief in what life is for, becomes desperate enough to choose a square yard of rock. Faith does not appear in this thought; that is the point.

“Suffer and expiate your sin by it, that's what you must do.”

Sonya's instruction after Raskolnikov's confession. The English word expiate carries the theology Dostoevsky needs: suffering is not punishment but the means by which a person rejoins the human community they cut themselves off from. Sonya does not propose that Raskolnikov suffer instead of Siberia; she proposes that Siberia, undertaken willingly, becomes expiation. The distinction is the whole basis of the novel's epilogue.

“Become the sun, then everyone will see you.”

Porfiry, the investigator, advising Raskolnikov to confess. Notice the imperative: he is not telling Raskolnikov to confess so that he will be punished; he is telling him to confess so that he will be visible. Dostoevsky's police inspector is the novel's most Christian character outside Sonya, because he understands that the worst thing about being a murderer is the privacy of it.

“He had not even known that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.”

The last paragraphs of the epilogue, after Raskolnikov has begun to feel something he might be willing to call love for Sonya. The novel's argument in one sentence: redemption is real, but it is also expensive. Dostoevsky refuses the cheap reading in which the crime is paid for by Siberia. The price is to relearn how to live in the slowest, most painful way.