No Longer Human

“

“People also commonly speak of the 'wound of a guilty conscience.' In my case, the wound appeared of itself when I was an infant, and with the passage of time, far from healing it has grown only the deeper, until now it has reached the bone. The agonies I have suffered night after night have made for a hell composed of an infinite diversity of tortures, but—though this is a very strange way to put it—the wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection.”

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“The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.”

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“My unhappiness was the happiness of a person who could not say no. I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered to me, a yawning crevice would open between the other person's heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity.”

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“Now, I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.”

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“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.”

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“I felt as though the vessel of my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.”

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“He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.”

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“I thought, ''I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves — it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”

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“The more I think of it, the less I understand. 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.”

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“We were of one species if only in that we were both disoriented.”

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“Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.”

“

“My eyes would swim in my head, and the whole world grew dark before me, so that I felt half out of my mind.”