Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I'm tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don't understand where I am actually at fault. And add to that my wife's illness, my lack of money, the constant bickering, gossip, unnecessary conversations, that stupid Borkin... My home has become loathsome to me and I find living there worse than torture.

I was now, all the time, unutterably tired as if simply keeping alive was a terrible effort.

Endless suffering—all from not allowing the mind to do its job. Enough.

My mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

I feel immense physical, intellectual and emotional fatigue, so much so that at times I feel like throwing myself to the side of the road and dying, just like that, from exhaustion, from an inability to express myself, from a lack of love for life and the struggle, and simply because I no longer want to fight and make myself understood.

Sleep was like a phantom I was too tired to chase.

Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.

So great is my tedium, so overwhelming the horror of being alive, that I cannot imagine what could possibly serve as a palliative, an antidote, a balm, a source of oblivion.

There was nothing the matter with them except they were dead tired. It was not the dead-tiredness that comes through brief and excessive effort, from which recovery is a matter of hours; but it was the dead-tiredness that comes through the slow and prolonged strength drainage of months of toil.

I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.

He looked tired, exhausted even, but it was as if this were the specific thing that had exhausted him, not ordinary everyday matters but one single all-consuming care; it was obviously a fatigue born out of decades of vigilance, exhaustion owing to the knowledge that any moment he might be killed by that immeasurable weight of fat.

I was deeply grieved and suddenly depleted by a draining weariness. This day had been a nightmare, and I had not yet been asleep.

What’s worse is that long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.