Eric Adolf

“In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.”
― Albert Camus

“Instantly they fettered him, and carried him away to the regiment. There he was made to wheel about to the right, and to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his rammer, to present, to fire, to march, and they gave him thirty blows with a cudgel. The next day he did his exercise a little less badly, and he received but twenty blows. The day following they gave him only ten, and he was regarded by his comrades as a prodigy. Candide,”
― Voltaire, Candide

“How much water are you going to use, idiot? Who on earth washes like that?'
'I’ll never get it clean otherwise, citizen chief. It’s thick with mud.'
'Didn’t you ever watch your wife scrub the floor, pig?'
Shukhov drew himself up, the dripping rag in his hand, He smiled ingenuously, revealing the gaps in his teeth, the result of a touch of scurvy at Ust-Izhma in 1943. And what a touch it was - his exhausted stomach wouldn't hold any kind of food, and his bowels could move nothing but a bloody fluid. But now only a lisp remained from that old trouble.
'I was taken away from my wife in forty-one, citizen chief. I’ve forgotten what she was like.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich