A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
We’re all in this game together.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.
Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink. Which will be soon, and then the dark, and then be done with this ugliness...
Edward was at the stage of drunkenness in which the ego glows like a coal, and brilliant people become more inspired, but in which dull people, fired by the same inspiration, become only more dull.
He was made uneasy by unbraked hilarity and by extremes of sorrow alike, especially the latter; he preferred life to sail along pleasantly and evenly, and this, he knew, was for him a minor sort of tragedy.
Through some happy accident of heredity he had escaped his father’s tediousness, while retaining a little of his mother’s jolly high spirits and humor. This did not make him anything special, but at least he was good-natured.
To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush – like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.
One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.