From Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
"One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked."
When I was fifteen, the opening lines of Metamorphosis captured my and boarding school friends' short term teen attention span like no other book ( well may be with the exception of 'Call me Ismael', another fascinating opening we kept gigglingly repeated each time we encountered a hot guy on Rue de Bourg ) and it started my long lasting infatuation with Kafka, the author and the man. In 1970's Prague we had searched and searched for his house only to be told it was in Old Square where we were already hanging out smoking clover cigs. That was 1978! Ominously it was no: 2 right behind the square with the enormous clock towering over it.
The fact that Gregor admitted so very calmly to his hideous transformation was bewildering. ( Why wasn't he screaming in fright and asking his sister to burn him right there? )
We were in our teens and creatures in transformation, insolent monsters in our changing bodies. We did behave as beastly as possible mainly towards authority...
Kafka had become our idol, and this book our favorite although we did't really get it. In some fashion Gregor's sufferings became our suffering and his humiliations felt familiar. I guess hanging on our walls his handsome posters was our unarticulated “Fuck You” glowering down at world.