Status Updates From The Death of Ivan Ilyich

"Besides, why speak? I must act."

“What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction.”

“It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.”

"There is one bright spot there at the back, at the beginning of life, and afterwards all becomes blacker and blacker and proceeds more and more rapidly"

"Why these sufferings?" And the voice answered, "For no reason — they just are so."

“I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death.”

“There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.”

"What do I want? To live and not to suffer”

"When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where shall I be when I am no more? Can this be dying?”

“Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? There was light and now there is darkness.”

“…the more she pitied herself the more she hated her husband.”