انقلاب زندہ باد

"Friends: none. Just a few acquaintances who think they get on with me and would perhaps be sorry if I got knocked down by a train or if it rained on the day of the funeral.

The natural reward for my withdrawal from life has been their inability, which I created, to sympathise with me. There's an aura of coldness around me, a halo of ice that repels others. I still haven't managed not to feel the pain of my solitude. It is so difficult to achieve the necessary distinction of spirit to make isolation seem a haven of peace free from all anguish.

I never believed in the friendship shown me, just as I would not have believed in their love, which was, anyway impossible. So complex and subtle is my manner of suffering that, although I never had any illusions about the people who called themselves my friends, I still managed to feel disillusioned by them.

I never doubted for a moment that they would all betray me and yet I was always shocked when they did. Even when what I was expecting to happen did happen, for me it was always unexpected."

"For those who would naturally be closest to me, I was always a guest who, as such, was well treated, but only with the attentiveness due to a stranger and the lack of affection which is the lot of the intruder.

I'm sure that the source of all this - I mean other people's attitudes towards me - lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliged others to reflect back my own lack of feeling."

"To mark the boundaries of the garden of my being I put up high railings, more daunting than any wall, so that while I can see others quite clearly, at the same time I exclude them and keep them other."

"Any reality troubled me. Other people's conversations throw me into a state of terrible anguish. The reality of other people's souls is a constant surprise to me."

"I'm like a being from another existence who passes, endlessly curious, through this existence to which I am in every way alien. A sheet of glass stands between it and me. I always try to keep that glass as clean as possible so that I can examine this other existence without smudges or smears distorting my view; but I choose to keep that glass between us."