Berlin Alexanderplatz - pg. 109

He says: "If on this earth you want to be, a creature, male and full of glee, be careful and weigh everything, before you let the midwife fling you towards the daylight, there to grow: Earth is a nest of grief and woe. Believe the poet of these verses, who often pines and often curses, while chewing on this iron crust -- quotation pinched from Goethe's Faust: Man only relishes life's glow, in general, as an embryo! ... There is the good old father State, he rags and irks you soon and late. He pricks and pesters you -- you're bled with laws and codes: 'Prohibited!' His first commandment: Man, shell out. His second: Hold your dirty snout. And thus you live in adumbration, your state is that of offuscation. And if you seek to drown your queer, rough anger at some pub with beer, or with some win, respectively, a headache promptly trails the spree. Meanwhile the years knock at the gate, the months erode the hair, elate. Suspiciously the rafters creak, the limbs grow flabby, blighted, weak: gray matter sours in the brain, and thinner grows the good old strain. In short, you see fall coming nigh, you put the spoon down and you die. And now I ask you, friend, a-quiver: just what is man, what is life's river? Did not our great poet Schiller confess: 'It's not the highest men possess'. But I say it's a chicken-ladder at best, up and down and all the rest."