Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Then he suddenly saw clearly that he was leading a strange life, that he was doing many things that were only a game, that he was quite cheerful and sometimes experienced pleasure, but that real life was flowing past him and did not touch him. Like a player who plays with his ball, he played with business, with the people around him, watched them, derived amusement from them; but with his heart, with his real nature, he was not there.

The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer by Eugenio Montejo

The earth turned to bring us closer,


it spun on itself and within us, 
and

finally joined us together in this dream


as written in the Symposium.
 Nights

passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
 time

passed in minutes and millennia.
 An ox

cart that was on its way to Nineveh
 arrived

in Nebraska.
 A rooster was singing some

distance from the world, 
in one of the

thousand pre–lives of our fathers.
 The

earth was spinning with its music
 carrying

us on board;
 it didn't stop turning a single

moment 
as if so much love, so much that's

miraculous 
was only an adagio written long

ago 
in the Symposium’s score.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

It’s like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest—one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do after all—the big things come and go with no striving or our’n—they do, that they do.

The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten

Humor is designed to deliver joy to others, but there is something about it that permits—even demands—an emotional distance from your subject. Part of it is that humor often requires a bloodless hostility; laughs usually come at the expense of something or someone. And part of it involves the nature of humor itself—it exists, on the deepest level, as a perverse denial of pain and fear. No one has ever explained this more succinctly or ingeniously than Dave Barry did in a tiny essay he wrote for a newspaper magazine I edited in the 1980s. I had asked him to create a definition of “sense of humor.” He took three days. This is what he wrote: “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which you realize that you are trapped in a world almost entirely devoid of reason. Laughter is how you release the anxiety you feel at this knowledge.”

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

That wasn’t it.  Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven.  Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death:  death will overtake us before heaven.  The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.  But who wants to die?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excrutiating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.

Farewell Ungrateful Traitor by John Dryden

Farewell, ungrateful traitor! 


Farewell, my perjur'd swain! 


Let never injur'd woman 


Believe a man again. 


The pleasure of possessing 


Surpasses all expressing, 


But 'tis too short a blessing, 


And love too long a pain.

'Tis easy to deceive us 


In pity of your pain, 


But when we love, you leave us 


To rail at you in vain. 


Before we have descried it, 


There is no joy beside it, 


But she that once has tried it 


Will never love again.

The passion you pretended 


Was only to obtain, 


But once the charm is ended, 


The charmer you disdain. 


Your love by ours we measure 


Till we have lost our treasure, 


But dying is a pleasure 


When living is a pain.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced at spearpoint into the present tense. Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly; you clutch at any hope, however unlikely; however—if I may use such an overworked word--miraculous. What we mean by that is, Against all odds. 

The Plague by Albert Camus

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

Chronicles by Bob Dylan

The thermometer was creeping up to about ten below. My breath froze in the air, but I didn’t feel the cold. I was heading for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don’t think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either. I’d come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.

Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away—you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch—and your mind says, “Have I worked enough?  Have I eaten enough?  Have I loved enough?” All of these, of course, are the foundation of man’s greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. “What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?”  And now we’re coming to the wicked, poisoned dart: “What have I contributed in the Great Ledger?  What am I worth?” And this isn’t vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.


The Stranger by Albert Camus

In the darkness of my mobile prison I could make out one by one, as if from the depths of my exhaustion, all the familiar sounds of a town I loved and of a certain time of day when I used to feel happy. The cries of the newspaper vendors in the already languid air, the last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sandwich sellers, the screech of the streetcars turning sharply through the upper town, and that hum in the sky before night engulfs the port: all this mapped out for me a route I knew so well before going to prison and which now I traveled blind. Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day…as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent. 

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

All the aching muscles and the hunger in my belly were bad enough, and the surroundant dark rocks, the fact that there is nothing there to soothe you with kisses and soft words, but just to be sitting there meditating and praying for the world with another earnest young man - ‘twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are.  Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity stretching in front of all our phantom unlaundered eyes, friends.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.