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"My love has never made anyone happy, for I have never sacrificed anything for those I loved; I have loved only for myself, for my own pleasure; I have striven only to satisfy a strange craving of the heart, greedily absorbing their emotions, their tenderness, their joys and sufferings - and have never been sated."
— Mikhail Lermontov

"No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all."
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."
— Albert Camus

"He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."
— Leo Tolstoy

"The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for."
"But how could you live and have no story to tell?"
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."
— David Foster Wallace

"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams

"Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it."
"For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair."
— Donna Tart

“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”
— Alberto Giacometti

"I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations."
— Mary Shelley