"If Life Ain't Just a Joke ... Then Why Am I Laughing?"

Post title irrelevant, once again. This is simply the song I am listening to <3

Wow, guys. I feel like I've been neglecting the world of Blogspot D: Not that I imagine many of you are feeling deprived of your daily dose of my long and drawn-out rambles. lol
But, I felt I owed you, dear readers, an update. So, I'm going to grace your minds with the powerful words of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
... please don't kill me.

Right now I and the rest of my honors english classmates are reading the novel Notes From Underground, written by the abovementioned author. I must say, I am enjoying it oh so much. Dostoevsky has a twisted mind, it seems - and interesting and unorthodox approach to the world, to humanity, to the very existence we all enjoy. He thinks about thinks so much, and seems to have a captivating and fascinating explanation behind everything we as human beings experience in a given day. And yet, at the end of these explanations, you seem even more curious than before.
Or maybe this is simply the perspective of the character in this novel. The character has no name, and is fittingly referred to by readers of Notes From Underground as "The Underground Man". Dostoevsky's development of this character is captivating, and I find myself relating to him in many, many ways. It seems this character - and Dostoevsky himself - knows all about humanity and the things we as a being go through in this life.

As of tonight, I have read the first eight chapters of this novel, as my English teacher suggested. I have enjoyed every page.
So, enrich your lives, and read these quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground. These are my favorites from the chapters I have read thus far.

"I felt them positively swarming in me, these opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely would not let them come out."


"I did not know how to become anything: ...an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything."


"What what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself."


"...the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubt and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the different men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it 'till their healthy sides ache. ... There in the nasty, stinking, underground home our isolated, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite."


"Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength."


"...still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache."


"Can a man of perception respect himself at all?"


"Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself?"


"I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way."


"You look into it, the object flies off into the air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left again - that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can."


"I should have snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into a glass and then drain it to all that is 'good and beautiful'."


"What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out on another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness."


"And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice."


"Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick."

I'm sure you all enjoyed that as much as I did, if not more <3
lol
And with that, I wrap up today's post.


Happy New Year, by the way (:

keep on living.
xoxo