William Somerset Maugham. Of human bondage (№ 6468)

What happened here was not, strictly speaking, neither a tragedy nor a Comedy. It was generally hard to call them something, so was there a mixture of different contradictions and laughter and tears and joy and sorrow, of painful boredom and a most lively interest (all depended on how you look at it), as it was here seething life of passion, deep meaning, funny and sad, vulgar simplicity and emotional complexity, there was happiness and despair, maternal love and the love of man to woman; these offices dragged their heavy feet lust, castigating and indiscriminately the guilty and the innocent, helpless wives and helpless children; drunkenness enslaved men and women, forcing them to pay tribute to fatal; death filled these rooms with their sighs; they listened to the beating of nascent life, filling the soul of some poor girl with shame and despair. There was neither good nor evil. Only one reality. Life.