Don't tease me. Everything wounds me now except perfect kindness. - Iris Murdoch

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

I need love, I've never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.

The idea of killing himself was now more real to him than it had ever been, and he understood for the first time how it is that men can prefer extinction to the continuation of agonizing mental pain. He simply must somehow stop himself from suffering in this way. A guilt about Sophie roved sharply inside him and a cinematograph in his head re-enacted and re-enacted certain scenes. He must, he thought, now somehow switch himself off or else move on into some new and even more awful mode of being.