threnoidia

“So identical were their pitiful whimpers, the way their screams gave way to desperate entreaties then returned to screams, that the notion came to me: this was what each of us would go through on our way to death, that these terrible noises were as universal as the crying of newborn babies.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans

“She came for him like an astronaut, bouncing on the gray carpet. The only English word she knew was his name.

Almost weightlessly, she reached for him. For wasn’t she equally terrified? There was no buoy other than this boy, who had gripped her with his thin, freckled arms, bellying her out of the peat bog and into time.”
― Karen Russell, The Bog Girl

“—What should I do? I can't bear living. Life is so short and I can't bear living.
—But there's so much, Lóri, that you still don't know. And there's a place where despair is a light and a love.
— And afterward?
— Afterward is Nature.
— You're calling death Nature.
—No, Lóri, I'm calling us Nature.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“I didn't understand: you don't believe what you believe on purpose. Could you be punished because certain ideas come into your mind?”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Inseparable