"I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall...
And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry."

"Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here."

"(...) Melquiades had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant."

"He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude."

"It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight."

"He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams."

"People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There's also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush."

"Manuscripts don't burn"

"You pronounced your words as if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of either shadows or evil. But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and from living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid."

"I was then already bearing the underground in my soul. I was terribly afraid of somehow being seen, met, recognized."

"Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition."

"The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she's not the point! The old woman was merely a sickness... I was in a hurry to step over... it wasn't a human being I killed, it was a principle! So I killed the principle, but I didn't step over, I stayed on this side... All I managed to do was kill. And I didn't even manage that, as it turns out..."

"What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?"

When investigator Porfiry Petrovich, in the third conversation with Raskolnikov, tells him: "It's not a matter of time, but of yourself. Become the sun, everyone will see you. The sun must first of all be the sun", then he means [...] the fact that the hero, in fact, did not dare to become Napoleon, avoiding truly determination and fate last.