Hunger (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

The consciousness of being honest went to my head, filling me with the glorious sensation that I was a man of character, a white beacon in the midst of a turbid human sea with floating wreckage everywhere.

There was no doubt that here I found myself before a special kind of darkness, a desperate element which no one had previously been aware of. The most ludicrous ideas filled my mind, and every little thing frightened me.

But write—no, I couldn’t do it. After a few lines nothing more occurred to me; my thoughts were elsewhere and I couldn’t pull myself together to make any definite effort. I was acted on and distracted by everything around me, all that I saw gave me new impressions.