Luc De Coster

“If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“I am pursuaded of it, madam, as much as can be, That both man and woman bear pain or sorrow, (and, for aught I know, pleasure too) best in a horizontal position.”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible.But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy-that is every man's tragedy.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“There were two ways of looking at life;or two extremes of viewpoint, anyway, with a continuum between them. One proposed that every human action necessarily carried with it the obliteration of every other action which might have been performed instead; life therefore consisted of a succession of small and large choices, expressions of free will, so that the individual was like the captain of some paddle steamer chugging down the mighty Mississipi of life. The other proposed that it was all inevitability, that pre-history ruled, that a human life was no more than a bump on a log which was itself being propelled down the mighty Mississipi, tugged and bullied, smacked and weedled, by currents and eddies and hazards over which no control was possible. Paul thought it did not have to be one or the other. He thought a life – his own, of course – could be lived first under the dispensation of inevitability, and later under the dispensation of free will. But he also realized that retrospective reorderings of life are always likely to be self-serving.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story