salt and solitude

compilation of my favorite lines from White Nights

"I am perishing in solitude"

"I can't help coming here tomorrow, I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that I look upon such moments as this now, as so rare, that I cannot help going over such moments again in my dreams. I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year. I shall certainly come here tomorrow, just here to this place, just at the same hour, and I shall be happy remembering today. This place is dear to me already. I have already two or three such places in Petersburg. I once shed tears over memories... like you..."

"But what has happened? It is as though a miracle, had befallen me... In two minutes you have made me happy for ever... who knows, perhaps, you heave reconciled me with myself, solved my doubts"

"I have lived, as they say, keeping myself to myself, that it, utterly alone--alone, entirely alone."

"The dreamer... is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort."

"At this moment, Nastenka, when we have met at last after such a long separation--for I have known you for ages, Nastenka, because I have been looking for some one for ages, and that is a sign that it was you I was looking for, and it was ordained that we should meet now--at this moment a thousand valves have opened in my head, and I must let myself flow in a river of words or I shall choke."

"A vague sensation faintly stirs his heart and sets it aching, some new desire temptingly tickles and excites his fancy, and imperceptibly evokes a swarm of fresh phantoms. Stillness reigns in the little room; imagination is fostered by solitude and idleness; it is faintly smouldering, faintly simmering... His imagination is again stirred and at work, and again a new world, a new fascinating life opens... a fresh dream--fresh happiness! A fresh rush of delicate, voluptuous poison!"

"Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself... Meanwhile,... you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream... that their life is being eternally renewed."

"One feels that this inexhaustible fancy is weary at last and worn out with continual exercise... outgrowing one's old ideals: they are being shattered into fragments, into dust; if there is no other life one must build one up from the fragments. And meanwhile the soul longs and craves for something else! And in vain the dreamer rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers... and so luxuriously deceived him."

"You know it will be sad to be left alone, utterly alone, and to have not even anything to regret--nothing, absolutely nothing... for all that you have lost, all that, all was nothing, stupid, simple nullity, there has been nothing but dreams."

"I love now to recall and visit certain dates and places where I was once happy in my own way... to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past"

"One thanks some people for being alive at the same time with one; I thank you for having met me, for my being able to remember you all my life"

"How could I have been so blind, when everything had been taken by another already, when nothing was mine; when, in fact, her very tenderness to me, her anxiety, her love... was nothing else but joy at the thought of seeing another man"

"Don't talk about him; don't tell me that he will come, that he has not cast me off so cruelly and so inhumanly as he has... How easy it is for him to wound, to insult a poor defenceless girl, whose only fault is that she loves him... When I think that I was the first to go to him, that I humbled myself before him, cried, that I begged of him a little love... the lowest creature on earth is treated more compassionately."

"I don't know him; I don't love him any more. I will... forget him."

"I cannot stay here any longer, you cannot see me again; I will tell you everything and go away. I only want to say that you would never have found out that I loved you. I should have kept my secret."

"He has despised me, he has been laughing at me... he has insulted me and wounded my heart. I... I do not love him, for I can only love what is magnanimous, what understands me, what is generous... he has done better than if he had deceived my expectations later, and shown me later what he was... Perhaps my whole love was a mistaken feeling, a delusion."

"if only you were he"

"Perhaps the whole vista of my future flashed before me so sad and forbidding, and I saw myself just as I was now, fifteen years hence, older, in the same room, just as solitary... But to imagine that I should bear you a grudge... That I should cast a dark cloud over your serene, untroubled happiness; that by my bitter reproaches I should cause distress to your heart, should poison it with secret remorse and should force it to throb with anguish at the moment of bliss... Oh never, never! May your sky be clear, may your sweet smile be bright and untroubled, and may you be blessed for that moment of blissful happiness which you gave to another, lonely and grateful heart!"

"a whole moment of happiness... is that too little for the whole of a man's life?"