Tom Marcham

“The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances.”
― Geoff Dyer

“One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.'
'But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...'
'Life won't leave one alone as it is.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.”
― Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon