Karel Čapek

“ Without end or interruption moves a fourfold girdle of vehicles; buses, panting mastodons dashing along in droves with flocks of tiny mortals on their backs; purring motor-cars, lorries, steam engines, cyclists, buses, buses, flying packs of motor-cars, people rushing along, tractors, ambulances, people scrambling like squirrels on to the tops of buses, a new flock of motor elephants, that’s it, and now it all comes to a standstill, a grunting and rattling flood, and it cannot move forward ”

“ I was afraid that I should get lost, that I should be run over by a motor-bus, that something would happen to me, that it was all up with me, that human life is worthless, that man is a large-sized bacillus swarming by the million on a sort of mouldy potato, that perhaps the whole thing was only a bad dream, that mankind would perish as the result of some dreadful catastrophe, that man is powerless, that for no reason whatever I should burst out crying, and that everyone would laugh at me—the whole seven and a half millions of them. ”

“ I walk, run, move out of the way, ride, climb to the tops of vehicles or rush through lifts and tubes just like anyone else, but only on one condition—that I do not think about it. As soon as I want to bear in mind what is happening around me, I again have the tormenting feeling of something evil, ghastly and disastrous, for which I am no match. ”