Ninenda

“There may be no better way to clear the diary of engagements than to wonder who among our acquaintances would make the trip to the hospital bed.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared. It started with law school. That had retained a little something that was really good: there was fun, there was friendship, there was hope. But in the last years the good times had become more exceptional. Then, at the beginning of his service with the governor, some good times came again: memories of making love to a woman. Then it became all confused, and the good times were not so many. After that there were fewer still; the further he went the fewer there were.
Marriage. . .an accident and such a disappointment, and his wife's bad breath, and all that sensuality and hypocrisy! And the deadlines of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty - always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became.
'It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me...And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“...he suddenly asked himself: 'What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?'
It occurred to him that what had seemed utterly inconceivable before--that he had not lived the kind of life he should have--might in fact be true. It occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest what people of high rank considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest not been the real thing.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety