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 am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.

To wait. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one percent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine percent is just living in waiting. I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. Empty. Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.

Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.

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.

I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor; I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the main entrance; I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied.

What is society but an individual? [] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.