Carlene

“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt—and inflicted for precisely that reason.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding. I am constantly filled with wonder at the number of things that other people do without any evident difficulty that are pretty much beyond me.”
― Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away