To Read

To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true - nothing makes me happier, nothing binds me more to life. I also prefer it if the writer is dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the best books are by dead writers."

Orhan Pamuk

All my tendencies are deadly ones

All my tendencies are deadly ones, he once said to me, everything in me has a deadly tendency to it, it's in my genes. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless, world in which everything is always devastating and deadly.

Quote from The Loser by Thomas Bernhard

My melancholy

I have one intimate confidant—my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she waves to me, calls me . My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known, what wonder, then, that I love her in return.
—Søren Kierkegaard (from Either/Or)

A Gloomy View

There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims (tr. T. Bailey Saunders)