Liam Zee

“My saliva is sugary, my body warm: I feel neutral. My knife is on the table. I open it. Why not? It would be a change in any case. I put my left hand on the pad and stab the knife into the palm. The movement was too nervous; the blade slipped, the wound is superficial. It bleeds. Then what? What has changed? Still, I watch with satisfaction, on the white paper, across the lines I wrote a little while ago, this tiny pool of blood which has at last stopped being me. Four lines on a white paper, a spot of blood, that makes a beautiful memory. I must write beneath it: “Today I gave up writing my book on the Marquis de Rollebon.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“You have the power within you to endure anything, for your mere opinion can render it tolerable, perhaps even acceptable, by regarding it as an opportunity for enlightenment or a matter of duty.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The sense in which Goethe was right: Continued life means expectation, Death is the abolition of choice. The more choice is limited, the closer we are to death. The greatest cruelty is to curtail expectations without taking away life completely. A life term in prison is like that. So is citizenship in some countries. The best solution would be to live as if the ordinary expectations had not been removed, not from day to day, blindly. But that requires immense self-mastery.”
― Saul Bellow, Dangling Man

“On the other band, if adversity and hopeless sorrow have completely taken away the relish for life; if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it— not from inclination or fear, but from duty— then his maxim has a moral worth.”
― Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: With Linked Table of Contents