Notes from the Underground Revenge Quotes

There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in […] everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details. […] Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, […] knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself. (1.3.2)

I did not slink away through cowardice, but through an unbounded vanity. […] What I was afraid of was that everyone present […] would jeer at me and fail to understand when I began to protest and to address them in literary language. […] Of course, this trivial incident could not with me end in that. I often met that officer afterwards in the street and noticed him very carefully. I am not quite sure whether he recognised me, I imagine not; I judge from certain signs. But I – I stared at him with spite and hatred and so it went on ... for several years! My resentment grew even deeper with years. (2.1.19-20)

In this way everything was at last ready. […] It would never have done to act offhand, at random; the plan had to be carried out skilfully, by degrees. But I must confess that after many efforts I began to despair: we simply could not run into each other. I made every preparation, I was quite determined – it seemed as though we should run into one another directly – and before I knew what I was doing I had stepped aside for him again and he had passed without noticing me. […] One time I had made up my mind thoroughly, but it ended in my stumbling and falling at his feet because at the very last instant when I was six inches from him my courage failed me. (2.1.28)