Igor

“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”
― Emil Cioran

“Sometimes when I get up and emerge from the mists of slumber, my whole room hurts, my whole bedroom, the view from the window hurts, kids go to school, people go shopping, everybody knows where to go, only I don't know where I want to go, I get dressed, blearily, stumbling, hopping about to pull on my trousers, I go and shave with my electric razor - for years now, whenever I shave, I've avoided looking at myself in the mirror, I shave in the dark or round the corner, sitting on a chair in the passage, with the socket in the bathroom, I don't like looking at myself any more, I'm scared by my own face in the bathroom, I'm hurt even by my own appearance, I see yesterday's drunkenness in my eyes, I don't even have breakfast any more, or if I do, only coffee and a cigarette, I sit at the table, sometimes my hands give way under me and several times I repeat to myself, Hrabal, Hrabal, Bohumil Hrabal, you've victoried yourself away, you've reached the peak of emptiness, as my Lao Tzu taught me, I've reached the peak of emptiness and everything hurts, even the walk to the bus-stop hurts, and the whole bus hurts as well, I lower my guilty-looking eyes, I'm afraid of looking people in the eye, sometimes I cross my palms and extend my wrists, I hold out my hands so that people can arrest me and hand me over to the cops, because I feel guilty even about this once too loud a solitude which isn't loud any longer, because I'm hurt not only by the escalator which takes me down to the infernal regions below, I'm hurt even by the looks of the people travelling up, each of them has somewhere to go, while I've reached the peak of emptiness and don't know where I want to go.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka

“But deep under the earth, where the corpse serpent gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, there are three spinners. Three women who make our fate. We might believe we make choices, but in truth our lives are in the spinners' fingers. They make our lives, and destiny is everything. The Danes know that, and even the Christians know it, Wyrd biõ ful araed, we Saxons say, fate is inexorable.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Pale Horseman

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay