From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?
My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no.
You miss her, don’t you?” “Yes.
God killed me, and only after He had made me into someone entirely different from the person I had been, did he call me back to life.
No less than myself, though in a different way, he was entirely removed from the activities of the human beings of the world. We were of one species if only in that we were both disoriented.
Young people never say anything straight. You can tell they’re being honest if they hide behind a laugh.
I wept bitterly, crying aloud. I could have wept on and on, interminably.
I yearned with such desperation for “freedom” that I became weak and tearful.
I could believe in hell but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.
I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them – a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.
Yes, I may be a loser, but I’m the best dam loser you’ll ever meet.
The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals.
That is precisely what I don’t understand: if my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine? Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced that they have never once doubted themselves?
One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add some sort of embellishment to every situation – a quality which has made people call me at times a liar.
Crime and Punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged ‘crime’ and ‘punishment’ side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment – absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski’s mind – no, I still didn’t quite see...
I disliked the thought that I might suddenly be subjected to their suspicious vigilance when once the nightmarish reality under the clowning was detected. On the other hand, I was equally afraid that they might not recognize my true self when they saw it, but imagine that it was just some new twist to my clowning – occasion for additional snickers. This would have been most painful of all.
The voice of a resistance weak but desperate spoke from somewhere in my heart. It said that I had not caused anyone to die, that I had not lifted money from anyone – but once again the ingrained habit of considering myself evil took command.
I always shook with fright before human beings.
Now I have neither happiness nor happiness. Everything passes.
In other words, you might say that I still have no understanding of what makes human beings tick. My apprehension on discovering that my concept of happiness seemed to be completely at variance with that of everyone else was so great as to make me toss sleeplessly and groan night after night in my bed. It drove me indeed to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy.
A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance. If that’s beyond your comprehension, dear reader, then you and I will never understand each other. – The Flowers of Buffonery.