Listen! This is where it began but I keep getting muddled... The fact of the matter is that I now want to recall everything, every trifle, every little detail. I still want to collect my thoughts and – I can’t, and now there are these little details, these little details...
Is it not I myself who am to blame, instead of them?
Why I would sell the whole world for a single kopek, just so that nobody would bother me. Should the world go to hell, or should I go without my tea now? I’ll say let the world go to hell so long as I can have my tea whenever I want it.
She’ll come, if not today, then tomorrow, but she’ll find me. That’s the cursed romanticism of all these pure hearts! Oh the vileness, oh the stupidity, oh the narrowness, of these rotten, sentimental souls.
And again one asks oneself what has one done with one’s years. Where have you buried your best days? Have you lived or not?
You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don’t know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love.
What can be more precious than life? Nothing!
Finally: I’m bored, and I constantly do nothing. And writing things down really seems like work. They say work makes a man good and honest. Well, here’s a chance, at least.
But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all – but the certain knowledge that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now – this very instant – your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man – and that this is certain, certain!
What is to be done with millions of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness.
I’ve always wanted all or nothing!
The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book.
At that time I was only twenty-four years old. My life then was already gloomy, disorderly, and solitary to the point of savagery.
Not everything can be told in words, certain things it’s better never to tell.
You have to be all too basely in love with yourself to write about yourself without shame.
Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. “I am alone and they are everyone,” I thought–and pondered.
A dream is a strange thing. Pictures appear with terrifying clarity, the minutest details engraved like pieces of jewelry, and yet we leap unawares through huge abysses of time and space. Dreams seem to be controlled by wish rather than reason, the heart rather than the head–and yet, what clever, tricky convolutions my reason sometimes makes while I’m asleep! Things quite beyond comprehension happen to reason in dreams!
There are strange friendships: two friends almost want to devour each other, and they spend their entire lives living that way, but meanwhile they cannot part.
Don’t be like everyone else, even if you are the only one.
The door from the next room suddenly opened with a timid, quiet creak, as if thus announcing the entrance of a very insignificant person...