David

“In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "doing something"; academics participate in meaningless "debates," etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even "critical" participation or a critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a "dialogue" ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The "Bartlebian act" I propose is violent precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity-in it, violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), likewise activity and inactivity (the most radical thing is to do nothing).”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Clearly,” I said, “we should choose not to have good sense, if that good sense contributes to our misery.”

Everyone agreed with me, and yet I found no one who wanted to accept the bargain of becoming ignorant in order to become content. From this I concluded that though we greatly value happiness, we place even greater value on reason.

But yet, upon reflection, it seems that to prefer reason to happiness is to be quite insane.”
― Voltaire