Status Updates From The Age of Reason

Besides, she took heroin. That wasn't a bad thing, in one sense; indeed, it was quite a good thing, in principle; Boris had talked to Ivich about it, and they had both agreed that it was a good thing. But there were ways of doing it: if one took it to destroy oneself, either in despair or by way of emphasizing one's freedom, that was entirely commendable. But Lola took it with greedy abandonment,

Since then Boris had regarded grown-ups as bulky and impotent divinities. If they bent down, they looked as though they were going to break; if they slipped and fell, the effect they produced in the onlooker was a desire to laugh and a sense of awe-stricken abhorrence. …... Grown-up people's tears were a mystical catastrophe, the sort of tears God sheds over the wickedness of mankind.

he looks like a man who means to enjoy life, and I don't think the worse of him for that; …...
I can't explain it, I get the feeling he's austere, and then if you look at his eyes, you can see he knows too much, he's the sort of fellow who can't enjoy anything in a simple way, either eating, or drinking, or sleeping with women; he has to think about everything,

"I'm not so much interested in myself as all that," he said simply.
"I know," said Marcelle. "It isn't an aim, it's a means. It helps you to get rid of yourself; to contemplate and criticize yourself: that's the attitude you prefer. When you look at yourself, you imagine you aren't what you see, you imagine you are nothing. That is your ideal: you want to be nothing."