…ghosts are as it were shreds and fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as he is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, he begins to realize the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill he is, the closer becomes his contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a future life, you could believe in that, too.
Peter Petrovich belonged to that class of people who on the surface are very polite in society, who make a great point of behaving properly, but who are completely disconcerted when they are contradicted about anything, and become more like sacks of flour than elegant, lively people of society.
In fact from that evening onwards Razumikhin took his place with them as a son and as a brother.
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