غير أن هناك أناساً يتألمون ألماً متفجراً ينطلق انتحابات على حين فجأة، ثم إذا هو يعتصم بعد ذلك بالترتيل. وهذه الحالة تلاحظ على النساء خاصة، وليس هذا الألم أقل أو أخف من ألم الصامتين. إن الترتيل لا يخفف عن النفس إلا لأنه يحيي جروح القلب وينكؤها أعمق فأعمق. إن هذه الصورة من صور الألم لا تتطلب عزاء ولا تسعى إلى سلوى، لأنها تغتذي من الشعور باستحالة اشباعه، فالترتيل إنما يعبر عن الحاجة إلى نكء الجروح بغير توقف.
We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner. and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.
Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own conscience! Queer sort of reasoning!... He has not borrowed money from you, he doesn't owe you anything, so what are you reckoning on, if not his gratitude? So how can you repudiate it? Lunatics! They regard society as savage and inhuman, because it cries shame on the seduced girl; but if you think society inhuman, you must think that the girl suffers from the censure of society, and if she does, how is it you expose her to society in the newspapers and expect her not to suffer? Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophesy. Isn't that topsy-turvydom, isn't it infamy?
An anxiety with no object or purpose in the present, and in the future nothing but endless sacrifice, by means of which he would attain nothing - that was what his days on earth held in store for him... What good was life to him? What prospects did he have? What did he have to strive for? Was he to live merely in order to exist? But a thousand times before he had been ready to give up his existence for an idea, for a hope, even for an imagining. Existence on its own had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more than that. Perhaps it was merely the strength of his own desires that made him believe he was a person to whom more was allowed than others.