Life [had] replaced logic.

Crime? What crime? ... My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman ... and you call that a crime?

Let someone who was not from among the convicts try reproaching a prisoner for his crime and abusing him (though it's not in the Russian spirit to reproach a criminal)--there would be no end of cursing.

He has suffered a great deal and is still suffering from the idea that he could make a theory, but was incapable of boldly overstepping the law, and so he is not a man of genius.

I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet- and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him- and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity- it would be better to live so than to die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how- only to live!

The candle-end had long been burning out in the bent candlestick, casting a dim light in this destitute room upon the murderer and the harlot strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book.