Apurva

“False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“...he suddenly asked himself: 'What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?'
It occurred to him that what had seemed utterly inconceivable before--that he had not lived the kind of life he should have--might in fact be true. It occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest what people of high rank considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest not been the real thing.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and commonplace–and most horrifying.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich