"And she looked at her life and seemed to understand it and to grieve over it as if it were already over."

"Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning, and that is what I am experiencing just now."

"This was everything that I wanted to be done with, the relaxed banality of life without goals."

"Was this strange mode of life to go on and on?"

"I don't know what love can do for the terrible things of life."

"He lay on his back listening to his mother's quiet snoring and thinking how increasingly awful his life was becoming. It was as if he were being squeezed out of the world."

"Everything in his life now seemed to signal: too late."

"Life can be sudden."

"Ordinary consciousness simply becomes pain."

"Human life is short, we don't exist all that much. A pale brief flicker in the dark."