"White Nights" -  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    "It was an wonderful night, the kind of night, dear reader, which is only possible when we are young. [...] From early morning an astonishing melancholy had started to torment me. It suddenly seemed that I, so alone, was being abandoned by everyone - that everyone was deserting me."

    "All the passers-by looked at me so cordially that we practically bowed to one another; everybody was so happy about something, every last one was smoking a cigar. And I was happy as I had never been before. It was as if I had suddenly found myself in Italy - nature had so strongly affected me, a semi-invalid city dweller who had almost died of suffocation within the city's walls."

    " 'Strange!' I thought, 'she must be completely absorbed by something' "

    " 'Don't be annoyed; I'm laughing at the fact that you are your own worst enemy, and if you had tried, perhaps you might have succeeded, even though it was all taking place on the street;[...]"

 *Some of my favourite quotes from this excuisite and fascinating book. The quotes are only from the first thirteen  pages. The story begins from the second chapter which is  "The second night" where the narrator meets with Nastenka for the second time. A few things about the narrator, is that he has a lack of social ties of any sort. Fyodor Dostoyevsky paints him as a sensitive, philosophical man who yearns for female acceptance; all he wishes for is to share with someone his thoughts and feelings.

 *The narrator struggles with loneliness and lives in constant melancholy. The closest he has been to a frienship was at Fontanka river  with a "certain little old man", where  he affirms that: "He's even noticed me and shows a cordial concern for me", but they didn't  have any type of interactions, they simply greeted eachother with sympathy and compassion. He lives in his own mind and doesn't have an idea about reality and social interactions, all he ever does is wander alone in Petersburg lost in his own thoughts.

 *The narrator's first converstion with Nastenka is about the desire of love. I will leave a representative quote:    "And all I dream of every day is that at long last I will finally meet someone.[...] 'But how, with whom?. . .'   'Why with nobody, with an ideal, with the one I see in my dreams. I create entire love stories in my dreams.[...] That in the end all I'm asking her for is merely to say a few words to me, with sympathy, not to drive me away at the very first moment, to take me at my word, to listen to what I have to say..."

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