In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions altogether occupy a bare one per cent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine per cent is just living in waiting.
All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? – I don’t know.
The weak fear happiness itself.
I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.
Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer “Nothing.” The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.
For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.
Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.
I like roses best. But they bloom in all four seasons. I wonder if people who like roses best have to die four times over again.
In my case such an expression as ‘to be fallen for’ or even ‘to be loved’ is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was ’looked after.
I also have the impression that many women have been able, instinctively, to sniff out this loneliness of mine, which I confided to no one, and this in later years was to become one of the causes of my being taken advantage of.
Labeled a delinquent. That’s the only kind of label I want to be crucified under.
Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.
Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.
Not long ago I learned from a certain person in considerable detail about the worthlessness of your character. All the same, it is you who have given me strength, you who have put the rainbow of revolution in my breast. It is you who have given an object to my life.
It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.
The world, after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a simple then-and-there decision.
I want to spend my time with people who don’t look to be respected. But such good people won’t want to spend their time with me.
At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel that the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.
And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn’t know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.
I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.
What did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings?