Fyodor Dostoyevsky on Saint Petersburg

“...everything was going in regular caravans to the summer villas. It seemed as though Petersburg threatened to become a wilderness, so that at last I felt ashamed, mortified and sad that I had nowhere to go for the holidays and no reason to go away. I was ready to go away with every waggon, to drive off with every gentleman of respectable appearance who took a cab; but no one—absolutely no one—invited me.”

“I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentleman, that to be too conscious is an illness--a real thorough-going illness. For an's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg.”