A Shameful Life

Human life is so full of pure, vivid, merry duplicity that I begin to think they don’t even realize they are deceiving one another.

little by little, I was transformed into an eccentric clown.

I would do anything so long as it made people laugh, it didn’t matter what.

I’ve never heard anyone say that people live for money

people live to eat

What are they thinking about when they are walking down the street? Money?

Concerned with representing the thoughts, feelings, and anxieties of the author/narrator/protagonist with the greatest possible fidelity, I-novel narratives were not overly concerned with plot development or with showing how a character transforms or overcomes a particular problem.

The true coward is frightened even by happiness. He is bruised even by cotton wool. He is wounded even by joy.

At the time, the prospect of being arrested as a party member and imprisoned, even if it was for life, didn’t trouble me in the slightest. Compared to the terror I felt toward “real life” in human society and the hellish torments of my nightly insomnia, I sometimes thought that life in prison might be an improvement.

Desire is too weak a word for it, as is vanity.

Women were a hundred times more difficult for me to understand than men.