As for what concerns me, I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in deceiving yourselves.

So perhaps there is more life in me than in you. We don’t even know what living means now, what it is, or what it is called. Leave us without books and we are lost at once, not knowing what to love or hate, what to respect or despise.

We are oppressed at being men—ashamed of real body and blood, trying instead to become some impossible, generalized man. We are stillborn, and for generations begotten not by living fathers. That suits us better and better. Soon we shall contrive to be born from an idea.

But enough; I don’t want to write more from ‘Underground’.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky | Notes from Underground (1864)