No Longer Human (Confessions of a Faulty Man)

I was worried that people would find out my inmost nature and I did not want to be warned against anything. I was also afraid that people would not see me in the portrait, and consider it another whim of a buffoon, that it would only make everybody laugh and that would be the worst thing.

I used the word “ugly” just now, but there are people who cannot tell the difference between ugliness and beauty

my whole life consisted of embarrassment.

I have never managed to understand what human life is.

People always plunged me into horror. I even believed that I hadn't succeeded as a man, and as a result, I hid my torment in my heart of hearts.I tried hard to mask the melancholy and nervousness by wrapping myself in naive optimism and becoming an even bigger buffoon

I was a mean person

At the seaside, just near the water, where waves beat on the beach, trunks and naked branches of dried cherry trees are turning black.

“A man dies without food, a man works to eat. It is necessary to eat.”

Maybe it is the most horrible hellish agony.

I thought my main task was to make people laugh, and then they wouldn't notice my existence in what they called “life”. Anyway, I shouldn't become a thorn in the flesh. I was nothing, I was air, sky. Believing more in this idea, I isolated myself from my family by being eccentric. I desperately played the fool, even in front of servants who were more mysterious and intolerable than my family.