Chitharanjan

“It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Platform

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”
― Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

“Thus narcissism is an obsession with “what this person, that event means to me.” This question about the personal relevance of other people and outside acts is posed so repetitively that a clear perception of those persons and events in themselves is obscured. This absorption in self, oddly enough, prevents gratification of self needs; it makes the person at the moment of attaining an end or connecting with another person feel that “this isn’t what I wanted.”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

“Reason is the slave of passion,”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment