Janet

“Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.”
― Oscar Wilde