In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering — that is a fact.

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.