"Her heart was alive; and what was happening inside it? It was pain, pain and longing, and a melancholic jealousy, and a small piece of contempt, and a whole, pure, innocent happiness.
And Tonio Kröger sat for an hour on the narrow bench, in the dark. 'Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm,' he said to himself. It was not the first time he felt this tightening, this bitter and sweet discord of feelings.
But now it was something more; it was a conscious agony, a knowledge that burned him. Because now he knew that the world is full of such people, and that his own fate was to always stand outside, to look at them through the glass and never be able to become one of them."