Ryan

“Most people don't die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Something—he wondered later if it was simply his youth—something that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.”
― Patrick Modiano, Une jeunesse

“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt—and inflicted for precisely that reason.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I will quote Cioran (who is not yet a classic but will become one): "While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. 'What good will it do you,' they asked, 'to know this tune before you die?”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature