“Not for a single moment do I take you for the real truth,” Ivan cried, somehow even furiously. “You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a ghost. Only I don’t know how to destroy you, and I see I’ll have to suffer through it for a while. You are my hallucination. You are the embodiment of myself, but of just one side of me … of my thoughts and feelings, but only the most vile and stupid of them.

