Quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Surely, when I’m dead, there’s no chance the devils will fail to drag me down with their hooks. So that gets me thinking: hooks? Where do they get them from? What are they made of? Iron? And where do they forge them? Have they got their own works down there, or what? The monks in your monastery probably suppose that hell comes with a roof, for instance. Now I’m ready to believe in hell, but it shouldn’t have a roof: it’s in better taste without one, more enlightened, Lutheran-like,* if you see what I mean. But really and truly, what does it matter, roof or no roof? But then, that’s what the whole damned question is all about! For if there’s no roof, it follows there can’t be any hooks either. And if there aren’t any hooks, then it’s all a sham, and it’s even harder to swallow: who’s going to drag me down with hooks then,”
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Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."
His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.