I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over.

— Mo Hayder

In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being 'psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life.'When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. 'While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge,' she said. 'You are your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying.' A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three.

— Michael Finkel

Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can … Oh, but even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We are not meant to spend the rest of our lives underground. We need to go home and tell a strange story that no one will believe.

— Courtney M. Privett

Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality. You might think that --by following language and a logic that appears consistent-- you're able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge.

— Haruki Murakami

How shall a society remember its miners underground while it cannot even remember its homeless above ground?

— Mehmet Murat ildan

How quiet it is,' Danny said, digging in his knapsack for the canteen full of water he had brought. 'You don’t realize how scary it is, having a whole mountain on top of you, until you’re in the dark as I was in that tunnel, or when you begin hearing the silence.''I didn’t know you could hear silence,' said Irene.'Then just listen.'They sat still, and Danny added, 'Put out the flashlights for a minute.'In the dark, they understood what he meant. All the familiar noises of the upper world were gone: the wind, the rustle of branches or leaves, the chirping of birds, the sounds of automobiles and doors slamming, and people laughing. There was nothing but the faint tinkle of droplets of water, each drop like a distant musical chime, and each one pursued by tiny echoes. Then, after such a note had sounded there would be a long and empty quiet in which they could hear their own breathing and the steady beating of their hearts. They found themselves straining their eyes to see something, anything — the slightest sign of light, but they could not even tell the difference between opening their eyes and shutting them.Irene burst out suddenly, 'Put on the lights!'Danny let out his breath with a whoosh. They all snapped on their lamps, and as the welcome light flooded the chamber, he said, 'It’s — it’s like being buried alive.''Don’t let’s try that experiment again,' Irene said, with a shiver. 'I just hope we get out of here before our flashlights give out.

— Jay Williams

There is the title of one book In Underground One Can Meet Only Rats. And I'd re-phrase, In Cosmos One Can Meet Only Mutants, besides, rats are mutants too there, in cosmos, therefore, I'd rather walk on the ground.

— Lara Biyuts

To fall in love twice, with the same person, you need to grow another heart. That's all I do in my secret underground laboratory at night...

— Will Advise

I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.

— Neil Gaiman