When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash the moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering God of contentment and would rather feel the devil burn in me than this warmth of a well heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensation seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle-classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

-Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse