William

“Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers
everything, because it must. It is not our judgment that leads us;
it is neither the advantages nor the faults which we discover, that
make us abandon ourselves, or that repel us.

It is a sweet, soft, enigmatic power that drives us on. We cease to
think, to feel, to will; we let ourselves be carried away by it, and
ask not whither?”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Finally, though, I’d leave the room without even taking a sock at him. I’d probably go down to the can and sneak a cigarette and watch myself getting tough in the mirror. Anyway, that’s what I thought about the whole way back to the hotel. It’s no fun to be yellow. Maybe I’m not all yellow. I don’t know. i think maybe I’m just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn’t give much of a damn if they lose their gloves.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“They’s no use kiddin’ ourself any more,’ said Tommy Haley. ‘He might get down to thirty-seven in a pinch, but if he done below that a mouse could stop him. He’s a welter; that’s what he is and he knows it as well as I do. He’s growed like a weed in the last six mont’s. I told him, I says, “If you don’t quit growin’ they won’t be nobody for you to box, only Willard and them.” He says, “Well, I wouldn’t run away from Willard if I weighed twenty pounds more.”’
‘He must hate himself,’ said Tommy’s brother.
‘I never seen a good one that didn’t.”
― Ring Lardner, The Best Short Stories of Ring Lardner