Sophia

“She has no name for that feeling of utter abandonment, nor the feeling that comes over her on fair days, when she stands in the courtyard from the photo, and the voice of the loudspeaker booms front behind the trees, and the music and commercials run together in an unintelligible blur. It is as if she were standing outside the fete, separated from some earlier thing.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années

“He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life—its saving, its extension, its return—was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“Her inward calm was not shattered; but she felt sad and once she even burst into tears—she did not know why, but the insult she had suffered was certainly not the cause. She did not feel insulted: on the contrary, she had a feeling of guilt. The pressure of various conflicting emotions—an awareness that her life was on the decline, a longing for novelty—had brought her to the brink of an abyss; and as she peered over it, she saw no abyss but only a void…a shapeless chaos.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons