引用ノック0944

"You do not believe in God?"

"Come! it is I who am the atheist, is it?" the Abbe said, smiling.
"Let us come to practical matters, my child," he added, putting an arm
round Lucien's waist. "*snip* ... and I have a heart.
But, learn this, carve it on that still so soft brain of yours--man
dreads to be alone. And of all kinds of isolation, inward isolation is
the most appalling. The early anchorite lived with God; he dwelt in
the spirit world, the most populous world of all. The miser lives in a
world of imagination and fruition; his whole life and all that he is,
even his sex, lies in his brain. A man's first thought, be he leper or
convict, hopelessly sick or degraded, is to find another with a like
fate to share it with him. He will exert the utmost that is in him,
every power, all his vital energy, to satisfy that craving; it is his
very life. But for that tyrannous longing, would Satan have found
companions? There is a whole poem yet to be written, a first part of
_Paradise Lost_; Milton's poem is only the apology for the revolt."

"It would be the Iliad of Corruption," said Lucien.

(Honore de Balzac "Lost Illusions" translated by Ellen Marriage, released in 2004)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13159/13159.txt