E

“I was almost unimaginably vague, not because I was stupid, but because nothing really mattered to me. This is an enormous paradox, because everything mattered to me, far too much; I made a mountain out of every molehill, and that was my main problem... I might have seemed indifferent, but nothing could have been further from the truth and I knew it.”
― César Aira, How I Became a Nun

“He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.”
― César Aira, Varamo

“I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs...”
― César Aira, How I Became a Nun

“They had supper and went away, and Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.

With this consciousness, and with physical pain besides the terror, he must go to bed, often to lie awake the greater part of the night. Next morning he had to get up again, dress, go to the law courts, speak, and write; or if he did not go out, spend at home those twenty-four hours a day each of which was a torture. And he had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych