Notes from Underground

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I know better than any one that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else.

Though, after all, every one does do that; people do pride themselves on their diseases, and I do, may be, more than any one.

But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

don't rely upon your youth—all that flies by express train here, you know.

Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once.