“A novel requires a hero, and here there's a deliberate collection of all the traits for an anti-hero”

“Is there a living man in the country?" cried the Russian hero. I cry the same, though I am not a hero, and no one answers my cry.”

“Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man’s done and you want him to be a hero at the same time!”

“Bow or not? Call back or not? Recognize him or not?" our hero wondered in indescribable anguish, "or pretend that I am not myself, but somebody else strikingly like me, and look as though nothing were the matter. Simply not I, not I—and that's all," said Mr. Golyadkin, taking off his hat to Andrey Filippovitch and keeping his eyes fixed upon him. "I'm . . . I'm all right," he whispered with an effort; "I'm . . . quite all right. It's not I, it's not I—and that is the fact of the matter.”

“There's a measure in all things.”

“Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. [...] If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.”

“One life passed, another began, then that passed and a third began, and there's still no end. All the ends are cut off as if with a pair of scissors.”