David

“..they were yung and easily freudened..”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times better to be torn to pieces than to retain or bury it in me. That’s why I’m here, after all, that’s completely clear to me.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Melancholy

(1) An excess of black bile, anatomized by Robert Burton, embraced by the swooning Romantics as evidence of their fine sensibilities, now fallen into disrepair, renamed as depression, wrongly attributed to a deficiency of serotonin and cured by infantilizing, self-indulgent 'therapy' and overpriced, addictive drugs pushed on harassed, gullible doctors by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies which suppress their terrible side-effects in order to pursue their profits.

(2) A crippling disease of unknown aetiology which throughout human history has devoured hope, destroyed lives and, after a period of living death, sometimes relaxed its grip just long enough for the sufferer to summon the energy for a merciful suicide; now, at last, frequently curable by a combination of therapy and antidepressants.”
― Michael Bywater, Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did It Go?

“Indubitable in me is the greed for books. Not so much to own or to read them as to see them, to convince myself in a bookseller’s display of their continued existence. When there are several copies of the same book somewhere every single one gives me pleasure. It’s as if this greed came from my stomach, as if it were a misdirected appetite. Books I own give me less pleasure, whereas my sisters’ books do give me pleasure. The longing to own them is incomparably smaller, it’s almost absent.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka