Цитаты из книги The Setting Sun

Just as a man has the right to live, he ought also to have the right to die.

Undoubtedly you will weep when you learn the news — apart, of course, from such ornamental sentimentality as you may indulge in — but if you will please try to think of my joy at being liberated completely from the suffering of living and this hateful life itself, I believe that your sorrow will gradually dissolve.

This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.

Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness — they're heartbreaking. Whenever you can hear the gloomy sighs of woe from the four walls around you, you know that there's not a chance of happiness existing just for you.

Perhaps by depravity he actually meant tenderness.

But rather than the patronizing "But being decadent is the only way to survive!" of some who criticize me, I would far prefer to be told simply to go and die. It's straightforward. But people almost never say, "Die!" Paltry, prudent hypocrites!

Of late a gloomy rain has been falling almost incessantly. Whatever I do depresses me.

A sensation of helplessness, as if it were utterly impossible to go on living. Painful waves beat relentlessly on my heart, as after a thunderstorm the white clouds frantically scud across the sky. A terrible emotion — shall I call it an apprehension — wrings my heart only to release it, makes my pulse falter, and chokes my breath. At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel that the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.

"I like roses best. But they bloom in all four seasons. I wonder if people who like roses best have to die four times over again."

In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim.

"You wanted just the two of us to be together, didn't you?" I spoke with a little laugh. He twisted his mouth into a bitter smile. "That's the nuisance of it." I was intensely, almost painfully, aware of the fact that it was love he felt for me.

Respect? Sincerity? Rubbish! You can't go on living with them, can you? Unless we can say hello, really casually, there are only three possible courses left — return to the farm, suicide, or becoming a gigolo.

To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense under-taking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.

If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised.

The dying are beautiful, but to live, to survive-those things somehow seem hideous and contaminated with blood.

"No, I'm not the least bit sleepy. I have been reading a book about Socialism and I'm all worked up over it."

I have never felt myself drawn toward revolution, and I have not even known love.

It was not so much shame that I experienced as the feeling that the actual world was an unfamiliar organism utterly unlike the world of my imagination.

I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness.