I enjoy most novels that feel like life. Life is mostly just existing. Life is slow and detailed. I live life in thought. Similar to DFW, The Brothers Karamazov felt “real”, in a different way. But I felt like I knew the brothers. I often don’t care about the plot of books. I care about seeing or experiencing life through a character’s life or an author’s life through a character’s life. So when a book lacks detail and therefore doesn’t feel “real”, that’s when I’m most disappointed in a novel.

I didn’t really take much away from this novel. But it was an experiential novel and therefore, I enjoyed it tremendously. At parts of this book, I was ready to deem this my favorite novel at this time in my life because of how closely the themes of religion struck me.

Life is often about taking it day-by-day and some novels, like this one are about taking it page-by-page or chapter-by-chapter. There are chapters of life that aren’t particularly exciting and therefore, there should be chapters of books that aren’t exciting. That’s a beautiful thing.

When discussing The Brothers Karamarazov the question people ask is “which one do you most reasonate with?”. For me, it was a bit of the naivety and pure beliefs of Aloysha and the religious pushback of his brother Dmitri in chapter TODO

p29 - “A man who dooms himself to this trial, this terrible school of life, does so voluntarily, in the hope that after the long trial he will achieve self-conquest, self-mastery to such a degree that he will, finally, through a whole life’s obedience, attain to perfect freedom — that is, freedom from himself.”

p30 - “the moral regeneration of a man from slavery to freedom and to moral perfection may turn into a double-edged weapon, which may lead a person not to humility and ultimate self-control but, on the contrary, to the most satanic pride — that is, to fetters and not to freedom.”

p40 - “the elder had his cell”. I thought this was interesting that they called the rooms “cells” in the monestary.

p46 - “Above all, do not lie to yourself.”

p52 - “how bold these infants are before the throne of God? … the Lord immediately puts them in the ranks of the angels.”

p56 - “What do you mean — healed? Isn’t she still lying in her chair?”

p58 - “Improvement is not yet a complete healing, and might also occur for other reasons.”

p58 - “I suffer from … lack of faith…”

p59 - I note this is a hilarious mockery of faith. “One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.”

p59 - “The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.”

p60 - “if there’s anything that would immediately cool my ‘active’ love for mankind, that one thing is ingratitude. In short, I work for pay and demand my pay at once, that is, praise and a return of love for my love. Otherwise I’m unable to love anyone.”

p60 - “the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular”

p66 - “every earthly state must eventually be wholly transformed into the Church and become nothing else by the Church … Something even resembling socialism … but a real punishment, the only real, the only frightening and appeasing punishment, which lies in the acknowledgment of one’s own conscience. … it does not excommunicate him … if Christian society, too — that is the Church — rejected him in the same way that civil law rejects him … in the desparate heart of the criminal … the Church, like a mother, tender and loving.”

p70 - “The state is abolished on earth, and the Church raised to the level of the state! … ‘We are not, in fact, afraid of all these socialists, anarchists, atheists, and revolutionaries’ … keep an eye on them … believers in God and Christians, and at the same time socialists. They are the ones we are most afraid of; they are terrible people! A socialist Christian is more dangerous than a socialist atheist.”

p73 - “were mankind’s belief in its immorality to be destroyed, not only love but also any living power to continue the life of the world would at once dry up in it. Not only that, but then nothing would be immoral any longer”

p74 - “Evildoing should not only be permitted but even should be acknowledged as the most necessary and most intelligent solution for the situation of every godless person. … There is no virtue if there is no immorality.”

p84 - “You’re a Karamazov, too! In your family sensuality is carried to the point of fever … It’s that a man falls in love with some beautiful thing, with a woman’s body, or even with just one part of a woman’s body (a sensualist will understand that), and is ready to give his own children for it, to sell his father and mother, Russia and his native land, and though he’s honest, he’ll go and steal; though he’s meek, he’ll kill; though he’s faithful, he’ll betray.”

p84 - “He may despise her, but he still can’t tear himself away from her.”

p94 - “No, holy monk, try being virtuous in life, be useful to society without shutting yourself up in a monastery on other people’s bread, and without expecting any reward up there … You, holy fathers, are sucking the people’s blood!”

p115 - insects and angels

p115 - “Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.”

p143 - “‘No, there is no God.’ ‘Alyoshka, is there a God?’ ‘There is.’ … Lord, just think how much faith, how much energy of all kinds man has spent on this dream, and for so many thousands of years! … what I wouldn’t do to the man who first invented God! Hanging from the bitter aspen tree would be too good for him. There would be no civilization at all if God had not been invented.”

p234 - “My brothers are destroying themselves … my father, too .. And they’re destroying others with them. This is the ’earthy force of the Karamazov’s’ … And look, maybe I don’t even believe in God.”

p238 - “I’d have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss”

p238 - “Can a Russian peasant have feelings comparably to an educated man? With such lack of education, he can’t have any feelings at all.”

==p244== - “==If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment — still I would want to live== … my youth will overcome everything — all disillusionment, all aversion to life. … is there such despair in the world as could overcome this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me … the thirst for life despite all … There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet, Alyosha. I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic. Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me … Such things you love no with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength… I think that everyone should love life before everything else in the world. Love life more than its meaning? Certainly, love it before logic …”

p248 - I have a note that the book really strikes me here. “All of young Russia is talking now only about the eternal questions. Precisely now, just when all the old men have suddenly gotten into practical questions. … How believest thou, if thou believest anything at all? … what are they going to argue about, seizing this moment in the tavern? About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order, but it’s the same damned thing, the questions are all the same, only from the other end.”

p249 - Did man create God or did God create man? “You did proclaim yesterday at father’s that there is no God… I said that on purpose yesterday, at dinner with the old man, just to tease you… I want to get close to you, Alyosha, because I have no friends…. there was in the eighteenth century an old sinner who stated that if God did not exist, he would have to be invented … the wonder would not be that God really exists, the wonder is that such a notion — the notion of the necessity of God — could creep into the head of such a wild and wicked animal as man … I long ago decided not to think about whether man created God or God created man. … if God exists and if he indeed created the earth, then, as we know perfectly well, he created it in accordance with Euclidean geometry.”

==p250== - “Is have a Euclidean mind, an earthly mind, and therefore it is not for us to resolve things that are not of this world. And I advise you never to think about it. … All such questions are completely unsuitable to a mind created with a concept of only three dimensions. And so, I accept God, not only willingly, but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us; I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony …”

p251 - “Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest. … I never could understand how it’s possible to love one’s neighbors. … The question is whether this comes from bad qualities in people, or is inherent in their nature. … It’s still possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, and even occassionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close. … one can love children even up close, even dirty or homely children … little children have not eaten anything and are not yet guilty of anything. … If they, too, suffer terribly on earth, it is, of course, for their fathers; they are punished for their fathers who at the apple”

==p253== - “no beast could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artisitically cruel. A tiger simply gnaws and tears, that is all he can do. … I think that if the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”

==p258== - “absurdities are all too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities”

p259 - “I don’t want to let you slip, and I won’t give you up to your Zosima. … Listen to me: I took children only so as to make it more obvious. About all the other human tears that have soaked the whole earth through, from crust to core, I don’t say a word, I’ve purposely narrowed down my theme. I am a bedbug, and I confess in all humility that I can understand nothing of why it’s all arranged as it is. So people themselves are to blame: they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven … I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself. And retribution not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth, so that I see it myself. … I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion, and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for. All religions in the world are based on this desire, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I going to do with them?”

p260 - “Just art thou, O Lord, for thy ways are revealed! Oh, yes, when the mother and the torturer whose hounds tore her son to pieces embrace each other, and all three cry out with tears: ‘Just art thou, O Lord’ … what do I care if the tormentors are in hell, what can hell set right here, … And where is the harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive, and I want to embrace, I don’t want more suffering. And if the suffering of children goes make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole ==truth is not worth such a price. … they have put too high a price on harmony;== we can’t afford to pay so much for admission … It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket. That is rebellion.”

p262 - “My poem is called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ … in the sixteenth century … it was customary in poetic works to bring higher powers down to earth. … for fifteen centuries have gone by since men ceased to receive pledges from heaven: ‘Believe what the heart tells you, For heaven offers no pledge.’ … But the devil never rests … for so many centuries mankind had been pleading with faith and fire: ‘God our Lord, reveal thyself to us’”

p267 - “freedom of their faith was the dearest of all things to you … they have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy.”

p268 - “three questions … By the questions alone, simply by the miracle of their appearance, one can see that one is dealing with a mind not human and transient but eternal and absolute. … You want to go into the world, and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom … what sort of freedom is it, you reasoned, if obedience is bouth with loaves of bread? … Feed them first, then ask virtue of them … Better that you enslave us, but feed us … they are forever incapable of being free”

p272 - I get a brief thought of Alyosha as Jesus. “And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself. … You did not come down because, again, you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted for faith that is free, not miraculous. You thirsted for love that is free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that has left him permanently terrified. … are slaves, though they were created by rebels.”

==p274== - “we shall be caesers, and then we shall think about the universal happiness of mankind … all that man seeks on earth, that is: someone to bow down to, someone to take over his conscience and a means for uniting everyone … Mankind in its entirety has always yearned to arrange things so that they must be universal. … save us from ourselves”

p276 - “they will submit to us gladly and joyfully. … their present terrible torments of personal and free decision … For only we, we who keep the mystery, only we shall be unhappy … the curse of the knowledge of good an evil. … I left the proud and returned to the humble, for the happiness of the humble”

p276 - the pressure build up here was INTENSE. “Ivan stopped” releives it. I felt like I was holding my breath.

p277 - “Your poem praises Jesus, it doesn’t revile him … as you meant it to. … do you really think that this whole Catholic movement of the past few centuries is really nothing but the lust for power only for the sake of filthy lucre? … Alyosha, it’s just the muddled poem of a muddled student who never wrote two lines of a verse. Why are you taking it so seriously?”

p282 - “expecting much, too much, from life”

p283 - “They talked about philosophical questions and even about why the light shone on the first day, while the sun, moon, and stars were created only on the fourth day”

p287 - “Why are you so afraid for your life? My brother Dmitri’s threats are all just passionate talk, nothing more. He won’t kill you; he’ll kill, but not you!”

==p306== - “Why count the days, when even one day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dears, why do we quarrel, boast before each other, remember each other’s offenses? Let us go to the garden, let us walk and play and love and praise and kiss each other, and bless our life.”

p308 - “for no memories are more precious to a man than those of his earliest childhood in his parental home, and that is almost always so, as long as there is even a little bit of love and unity in the family.”

==p317== - “is it so surprising now, in our time, to meet a man who has repented of his foolishness and confesses his guilt publicly? But not inthe middle of a duel! my second shouted again, ‘But that’s just it!’ I replied, ’that is just what is so surprising, because I ought to have confessed as soon as we arrived here, even before his shot … for only now that I have stood up to his shot from twelve paces can my words mean something … ’look at the divine gifts around us: the clear sky, the fresh air, the tender grass, the birds, nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, we alone, are godless and foolish, and do not understand that ==life is paradise==”

==p321== - “Paradise … is hidden in each one of us … Until one has indeed become the brother of all, there will be no brotherhood. … Each will always think his share too small, and they will keep murmuring, they will envy and destroy one another … It will come true, but first the period of human isolation must conclude. … For everyone now strives most of all to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for insted of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation. … He accumulates wealth in solitude, thinking: how strong, how secure I am now; and does not see, madman as he is, that the more he accumulates, the more he sinks into suicidal impotence. For he is accustomed to relying only on himself … he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people’s help, in people of in mankind.”

p330 - “I know I am dying, but I feel joy and peace for the first time … I at once felt paradise in my soul, as soon as I had done what I had to do. Now I dare to love my children”

p330 - “Do you remember how I came to you again, at midnight? I told you to remember it. Do you know why I came? I came to kill you!”

==p332== - “The world has proclaimed freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs: only slavery and suicide! For the world says: ‘You have needs, threfore satisfy them’ … And in this they see freedom. But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide. … is such a man free? … instead of freedom they have fallen into slavery, and instead of serving brotherly love and human unity, they have fallen, on the contrary, into disunity and isolation. … They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy. … The salvation of Russia is from the people.”

p336 - “why can I not be the servant of my servant”

p338 - “A loving humility is a terrible power, the most powerful of all, nothing compares with it. … love is a teacher”

p339 - “Be joyful as children, as birds in the sky. And let man’s sin not disturb you in your efforts … do not say, ‘Sin is strong, impiety is strong, the bad environment is strong, and we are lonely and powerless, the bad environment will dampen us and keep our good endeavor from being fulfilled.’ Flee from such despondency … take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. … we are doing something great and beautiful. … for the eternal judge will demand of you that which you could comprehend, not that which you could not — you will be convinced of that, for then you will see all things aright and no longer argue. But on earth we are indeed wandering”

p340 - “Remember especially that you cannot be the judge of anyone. … take upon yourself the crime of the criminal who stands before you … suffer for him … he will go away and condemn himself more harshly than you would condemn him. And if, having received your kiss, he goes away unmoved and laughing at you, do not be tempted by that either: it means that his time has not yet come”

p341 - “Your work is for the whole, your deed is for the future. Never seek a reward”

p364 - “’the disgrace of the righteous man,’ the probable ‘fall’ of Alyosha ‘from the saints to the sinners,’ … His elder got smelly”

p384 - “Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining star, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the flowerbeds near the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars…”

p408 - parallels to religion. “You are asking for a certain sum, you need three thousand, but I will give you more, infinitely more, I will save you, Dmitri Fyodorovich, but you must do as I say! … Infinitely? But I don’t need so much. All that’s necessary is that fatal three thousand”

p410 - “‘Part with everything, Dmitry Fyodorovich!’ Madame Khokhlakov interrupted him in the most determined tone. ‘Everything, women especially. Your goal is the mines”

p423 - “his bloody face and bloodstained hands, with a bunch of money in his trembling fingers”

p426 - “What are you looking at the bullet for? … if you had decided to blow your brains out, would you look at the bullet before you loaded the pistol, or not? … It will go into my brain, so it’s interesting to see what it’s like”

p467 - “If I were God, I’d forgive all people. … Everyone in the world is good, every one of them. The world is a good place. We may be bad, but the world is a good place.”

p485 - “It’s me, me, the cursed one, I am guilty! … it’s because of me that he killed him…! I tormented him and drove him to it!”

p512 - “I’m a beast, a man with no more self-restraint than a beast … But still not a thief! … Whatever you like, a beast, a scoundrel, but not a thief, no finally a thief, because if I were a theif, I’d have appropriated the other half as well and certainly not have brought it back.”

p539 - “Mitya was informed that from that moment on he was a prisoner … merely shrugged. Well, gentlemen, I don’t blame you, I’m ready … I understand that you have no other choice. … Gentlemen, we are all cruel, we are all monsters, we all make people weep … I want to suffer and be purified by suffering! … let God decide!”

p563 - Chapter 4 Zhuchka - I have this highlighted to indicate a good chapter, but have no notes. “in the end he gave himself up to me like a slave, … listened to me as though I were God”

p568 - “Oh, we’re all egoists, Karamazov!”

p585 - Again, I have Chapter 6 Precocity highlighted. “What, don’t you believe in God? … I admit, he is necessary, for the sake of order … if there were no God, he would have to be invented … America is a base thing, worse than base — it’s foolish. Why go to America, if one can also be of much use to mankind here? Precisely now.”

==p590== - “Oh Karamazov, I’m profoundly unhappy. Sometimes I imagine God know what, that everyone is laughing at me, the whole world, and then I … then I’m quite ready to destroy the whole order of things… people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it. I’m only surprised that you’ve begun to feel it so early… Nowadays even children almost are ready beginning to suffer from it. … So do not be like everyone else; even if you are the only one left who is not like that, still do not be like that.”

p615 - “I will love you terribly for allowing me not to love you so soon. … I wanted to tell you a wish of mine. I want someone to torment me, to marry me and then torment me, deceive me, leave me and go away. I don’t want to be happy! You’ve come to love disorder? … It’s your rich life, Alyosha said softly. Why, is it better to be poor? Yes, it is.”

p615 - “why live in reality, it’s better to dream. One can dream up the gayest things, but to live is boring.”

p616 - “I just don’t want to do good, I want to do evil, and illness has nothing to do with it. … They all say they hate what’s bad, but secretly they all love it. … they all love it that he killed his father. … They love it, they all love it! Everyone says it’s terrible, but secretly they all love it terrible… sometimes I have a dream about devils. … is it possible for two different people to have one and the same dream? … Sometimes I imagine that it was I who crucified him.”

p626 - “Tomorrow will be a terrible, great day for you: divine judgment will be passed on you … I’ve been waiting till this last time to pour out my soul to you. … What do I care if I spend twenty years pounding out iron ore in the mines, I’m not afraid of that at all, but I’m afraid of something else now: that this risen man not depart from me! Even there, in the mines … it’s possible to live, and love, and suffer! … everyone is guilty for everyone else. … life is full, there is life underground, too!”

p627 - “I am! In a thousand torments — I am; writhing under torture — but I am. Locked up in a tower, but still I exist, I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, still I know it is. And the whole of life is there — in knowing that the sun is.”

p632 - “After the trial you will decide yourself; you’ll find a new man in yourself, and he will decide.”

p662 - “You used to be brave once, sir, you used to say, ‘Everything is permitted,’ sire, and now you’ve go so frightened!”

p675 - “what good is faith by force?”

p679 - There is definitely a “devil” / evil, but is there a God? “He was trying with all his might not to believe in his delirium and not to fall into complete insanity. … they diagnose beautifully, … but they can’t cure you … even if you die, he said, at least you’ll have thorough knowledge of what disease you died of!”

==p681== - What is life without suffering? “without negation there will be no criticism, and what sort of journal has no ‘criticism section’? Without criticism, there would be nothing but ‘Hosannah’. But ‘Hosannah’ alone is not enough for life … If everything on earth were sensible, nothing would happen. Without you there would be no events, and there must be events. … People take this whole comedy for something serious … for suffering is life. Without suffering, what pleasure would there be in it — everything would turn into an endless prayer service: holy, but a bit dull. … Is there a God, or not? … I just don’t know”

p682 - “a consistent development of me I”

p693 - “Why do I suffer then? Out of habit. … So let us get out of the habit, and we shall be gods!”

You can feel the inner battle of Dostoevsky questioning his belief in God. So sure on either side.

p740 - there’s a strong theme of challenging societal norms or “inheritted values” “I hope that his youthful sunnymindedness and yearning for popular foundations will not turn later, as so often happens, into dark mysticism on the moral side”

p741 - “our dear mother Russia, we can smell her, we can hear her. Oh, we are ingenuous, we are an amazing mixture of good and evil, we are lovers of enlightenment and Schiller, and at the same time we rage in taverns and tear out the beards of little drunkards, our tavern mates. Oh, we can also be good and beautiful, but only when we are feeling good an beautiful ourselves. … We like very much to get things, but terribly dislike having to pay for them, and so it is with everything. Oh, give us, give us all possible good things in life (precisely all, we won’t settle for less) and, more particularly, do not obstruct our character in any way, and then we, too, will prove that we can be good and beautiful.”

==p742== - “It is usually so in life that when there are two opposites one must look for truth in the middle”

p760 - “we will raise a cup and toast the new happiness of the woman we adore, and then — right there, at her feet, we will blow our brains out before her, and punish our life!”

p761 - “why did he not shoot himself right then … It was precisely this passionate thirst for love and the hope of satisfying it right then and there that held him back.”

p763 - “And now he stands before his judges, before the arbiters of his fate … feel almost afraid before man, and afraid for man! … These are the moments when all the instincts of self-preservation rise up in him at once, and, trying to save himself”

p787 - “what is a father, a real father, what does this great word mean … did anyone give him at least a little love in his childhood? … the murdered old Karamazov cannot and does not deserve to be called a father … Love cannot be created out of nothing; only God creates out of nothing”

==p790== - “Fathers, provoke not your children! Let us first fulfill Christ’s commandment ourselves, and only then let us expect the same of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers but enemies of our children, and they are not our children but our enemies, and we ourselves have made them our enemies! … he who begets is not yet a father; a father is he who begets and proves still worthy of it … within the sphere of real life … itself imposes great obligations … let the sone stand before his father and ask him reasonably: ‘Father, tell me, why should I love you? Father, prove to me that I should love you’”

p793 - “if you want to punish him terribly, fearfully, with the most horrible punishment imaginable, but so as to save and restore his sould forever — then overwhelm him with your mercy!”

p795 - “if every child ought to ask his father, ‘Father, why should I love you?’ — what will become of us, what will become of the foundations of society, where will the family end up?”

p815 - “Oh, if only I, too, could some day offer myself as a sacrifice for truth!”

==p817== - “Papa, when they put the dirt on my grave, crumble a crust of bread on it so the sparrows will come, and I’ll hear that they’ve come and be glad that I’m not lying alone. … ‘Fly down, birds, fly down, little sparrows!’”

==p821== - “You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. … If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life.”

p823 - “do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something good and rightful!”