The Setting Sun

In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim.

"You wanted just the two of us to be together, didn't you?" I spoke with a little laugh.
He twisted his mouth into a bitter smile. "That's the nuisance of it." I was intensely, almost painfully, aware of the fact that it was love he felt for me.

Respect? Sincerity? Rubbish! You can't go on living with them, can you? Unless we can say hello, really casually, there are only three possible courses left — return to the farm, suicide, or becoming a gigolo.

To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense under-taking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.

If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised.

The dying are beautiful, but to live, to survive-those things somehow seem hideous and contaminated with blood.

"No, I'm not the least bit sleepy. I have been reading a book about Socialism and I'm all worked up over it."

I have never felt myself drawn toward revolution, and I have not even known love.

It was not so much shame that I experienced as the feeling that the actual world was an unfamiliar organism utterly unlike the world of my imagination.

I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness.