When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks,

>>9373971
I'm begining to know myself. I don't exist. I'm the space between what I'd like to be and what others made of me. Or half that space, because there's life there too...So that's what I finally am...Turn off the light, close the door, stop shuffling your slippers out there in the hall. Just let me at ease and all by myself in my room. It's a cheap world.

>>9373972
You think I don’t understand? The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming to be, but being. Conscious and awake at every moment. At the same time, the chasm between what you are to others and what you are to yourself. Every tone of voice a lie, every gesture a falsehood, every smile a grimace. Commit suicide? No, too nasty. One doesn’t do things like that. But you can refuse to move or talk. Then at least you’re not lying. You can cut yourself off, close yourself in. Then you needn’t play any roles, wear any masks, make any false gestures.

>>9373978
When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world - profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.

>>9373985
Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you

>>9373992
There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

>>9373995
Nobody is comforted by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really finds comfort in the past or present suffering of others … I cannot understand another’s suffering in order to diminish my own.

>>9373998
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.

>>9374004
Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.

>>9374007
Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations.

>>9374010
“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”

>>9374011
I’m lost if I find myself; I doubt what I discover; I don’t have what I’ve obtained. I sleep as if I were taking a walk, but I’m awake. I wake up as if I’d been sleeping, and I don’t belong to me. Life, in its essence, is one big insomnia, and all that we think or do occurs in a lucid stupor.

>>9374016
the approximate present does not approximately determine the future

>>9374027
If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.

>>9374034
The idea of a complete life, meaningful within itself, must probably be abandoned with the conception of the epic death—for catastrophes always have the power to draw into themselves remote realities and events from the distant past. If mortally weary people take an affirmative view of death, it is most likely the case that death relieves them of a burden. The reason for the allegedly positive relationship to death taught by these metaphysics is none other than the one which comes forcibly to mind today, and which I already mentioned: that the life in question amounted to so little that there was little resistance to its ending.

>>9374043
"A man by himself devours himself, when he is with others he is devoured, now choose."

>>9375256
"There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him--sickness, poverty, loss--and nobody will see it, just as he now neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others.

But there is no man with a hammer, the happy man goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly, like the wind in an aspen-tree, and all is well."