She was so gentle and persuasive that I grew accustomed to her kindness and took it almost personally. But I felt that I was beginning to cheat on my so-called destiny, my raison d’être as I called it, and stopped telling her everything that passed through my mind. I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night