“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my rusty lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the most devilish pain burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. - Harry Haller”

“I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impluse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself (...)For what I have always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.”

“I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.”

“Now it is as if I remember my grief rather than experience it. I remember the pain I suffered as the memories washed over me where I sat on the deck that day. Now I have only the memories of my own feelings, not the feelings themselves. That day the feelings were still alive, the pain real. Now I look back and I can see every detail but I am not there, inside it. My own pain is now forever calcified. I carry it with me, but it is no longer alive. (10)”

“When he smiles at me, I feel like I'm sitting under a heat lamp. I live for the times when his fingers brush my leg at lunch, or when we pass in the hallways and he raises his eyebrows at me, like we have a secret. I should feel bad--and I do, most of the time--but how can I stop thinking about him when seeing his face makes me feel so alive?”

“The anguish I always feel when she's in pain wells up in my chest and threatens to register on my face.”