English wording
Translation
Constance Garnett — Translator · Russian → English
The wording shown here follows the represented English edition or translation.
Why the edition matters
Translations and editions can differ in wording, punctuation and emphasis, so the source attached to each quotation matters when exact phrasing is important.
Source identified1
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.”
Voice: Fictional character · Raskolnikov
The thought notices how novelty can feel more threatening than familiar difficulty, but in the novel it belongs to Raskolnikov while he is approaching a contemplated crime, so it is not presented as generic motivational advice.
Source note: Crime and Punishment, Part I, Chapter I, Constance Garnett translation, Project Gutenberg #2554. Raskolnikov thinks this while walking toward the pawnbroker during his 'rehearsal'; the surrounding monologue is morally compromised and intentionally unstable.
Source identified2
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”
Voice: Fictional character · Razumihin
Razumihin values the capacity to make and correct one’s own mistakes over passive dependence on borrowed conclusions, making independent error part of an active search for truth.
Source note: Crime and Punishment, Part III, Chapter I, Constance Garnett translation, Project Gutenberg #2554. Razumihin says this during an excited argument about error, truth and Russia’s habit of living on other people’s ideas; it is character dialogue, not direct Dostoevsky autobiography.
Source identified3
“There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.”
Voice: Narrator voice · Narrator
The narrator observes that attention and interest can arise before conversation, capturing the immediate impressions people sometimes form in an encounter without claiming those impressions are necessarily accurate.
Source note: Crime and Punishment, Part I, Chapter II, Constance Garnett translation, Project Gutenberg #2554. This is narrator voice introducing Raskolnikov’s first interest in Marmeladov at the tavern, not a universal psychological law.