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Ennui Quotes

Ennui quote from classy quote

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

~ Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey Boredom Ennui Life

HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM. (Death)

~ Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett Apathy Boredom Cynism Ennui Humor

Mais, j’aurai beau supplier, j’aurai beau me révolter, il n’y aura plus rien pour moi ; je ne serai, désormais, ni heureux, ni malheureux. Je ne peux pas ressusciter. Je vieillirai aussi tranquille que je le suis aujourd’hui dans cette chambre où tant d’êtres ont laissé leur trace, où aucun être n’a laissé la sienne.Cette chambre, on la retrouve à chaque pas. C’est la chambre de tout le monde. On croit qu’elle est fermée, non : elle est ouverte aux quatre vents de l’espace. Elle est perdue au milieu des chambres semblables, comme de la lumière dans le ciel, comme un jour dans les jours, comme moi partout.Moi, moi ! Je ne vois plus maintenant que la pâleur de ma figure, aux orbites profondes, enterrée dans le soir, et ma bouche pleine d’un silence qui doucement, mais sûrement, m’étouffe et m’anéantit.Je me soulève sur mon coude comme sur un moignon d’aile. Je voudrais qu’il m’arrivât quelque chose d’infini !

~ Henri Barbusse

Henri Barbusse Death Depression Ennui Hell Hope Introvert Lethargy Tedium Weariness Weltschmerz

I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

~ David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace Angst Banality Death Despair Dread Ennui

Just for a while: Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.Join the Rat Race just for a while.Concentrate on your career just for a while.Move in with your girlfriend just for a while.Find a bigger place, out in the burbs just for a while.Lie down in that wooden box just for a while.

~ Christopher Brookmyre

Christopher Brookmyre Burbs Death Ennui Satire Suburbs

Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone

~ Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac Boredom Death Ennui Solitude

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.

~ Helen Keller

Helen Keller Church Devil Ennui Kindness Love Loving Religion Satan

When you are unemployed, weekends are seven days long.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Mokokoma Mokhonoana Apathy Bore Bored Boredom Dissatisfaction Dreariness Dullness Education Employ Employed Employee Employees Employer Employers Employment Ennui Flatness Friday Frustration Humor Humour Interesting Job Joke Lassitude Tedium Lethargy Monotony Repetitiveness Restiveness Restlessness Satire Saturday School Seven Sunday Unconcern Unemployed Unemployment Uninteresting Weariness Week Weekday Weekdays Weekend Weekends Weeks Work

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Emil M. Cioran Boredom Ecstasy Ennui Time

What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! (Give me more images)

~ Erik Pevernagie

Erik Pevernagie Addiction Dullness Ennui Escape Exuberance Generate Give Gratified Here And Now Iconic Imagery Images Inexorable Life People Power Redemptive Respite Tick Trap

Yes, Doc, I'm not feeling too well.'Which was true enough, Kwang Meng considered.He had honestly not been feeling too well since he contracted poverty, loneliness, boredom, sexual frustration and periodic coughs and colds. Not to speak of his dreary job.

~ Goh Poh Seng

Goh Poh Seng Doctor Visit Ennui Humour Illness

Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favor and esteem for his valor, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished, and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: “Yourself, sir,” replied the other, “by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of my life.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Michel De Montaigne Antigonus Attitude The Bravery Cure Duty Ennui Health Life Nothing To Live For Pain Safeguard Soldier The Cure Is Worse Than Disease Weary Of Life

For he has faith enough, he feels, if he were really to delve into himself, faith enough to move mountains, but he cannot manage to put his back into it. Once in a while the need to create wells up in him, the longing to see a part of himself set free in a work by him, and for days at a time his being can be tensed with joyous, titanic efforts to mold the clay into his Adam. But he is never able to shape him into a semblance of his image, he does not have enough stamina to maintain the self-discipline that it demands. It make take weeks for him to give up the work, but he does give it up, and irritably asks himself why he should keep on: what more does he have to gain? He has enjoyed the pleasure of creation, the tedium of upbringing remains, to nurse, nurture, and support entirely - why? for whom? He is no pelican, he says. But whatever he says, he is still ill at ease and feels that he has not done justice to the expectations he has of himself. It doesn’t help him to confront these expectations and try to doubt that their demands on him are justified. He is faced with a choice, and he must choose; for life is such that when the first youth is gone, sooner or later - depending on the natural disposition of the person - sooner or later a day dawns when resignation comes to you like a seducer and tempts you, and you have to say farewell to the impossible and accept it.

~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

Jens Peter Jacobsen Artists Character Creativity Ennui

Sitting to think of what to write will only set your ass on fire, give you headache, twist your face to look stupid, instead, walk around with a blank mind and something from somewhere will fill it up.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Michael Bassey Johnson Arson Ass Blank Boredom Brain Clever Contemplation Creative Thoughts Creativity Ennui Head Headache Heat Idea Ideas Insanity Inspiration Intuition Madness Magic Michael Bassey Johnson Muse Muses Musings Ponder Pondering Ruminate Rumination Thinking Thought Thoughts Writer Writers Writing

And I did nothing, nothing but try to hide from the horror of dying. He stopped, for saying the truth aloud was unendurable. It was not shame that stopped him, but fear, the same fear. He knew now why this tranquil life in sea and sunlight on the rafts seemed to him like an after-life or a dream, unreal. It was because he knew in his heart that reality was empty: without life or warmth or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more than that, a playing of illusions on the shallow void.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin Depression Ennui

None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away. The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldn’t bring myself to resume my job hunt; it was all I could do to drag myself from the bedroom floor to the sofa. With every passing day my financial affairs grew more ruinous, and it became harder and harder even to conceive of how I might dig myself out of the hole I was in—which only compounded my ennui, and my disinclination to do anything about it.

~ Paul Murray

Paul Murray Debt Depression Economy Ennui Jobs Money Uemployment

I came running down the stairs that morning, like it was Christmas. My parents were already up. In my family, presents never waited; they were there upon waking. Our family has a problem with what they called delayed gratification. We want what we want when we want it, and we always want it now.

~ Neal Shusterman

Neal Shusterman Delayed Gratification Ennui Spoiled Want Wealth

There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing.I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.

~ Clint Catalyst

Clint Catalyst Addiction Apathy Ennui Loneliness Love Lost

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.

~ Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles Collapse Of Meaning Ennui Existence Isolation Meaning Meaninglessness Modernism Postwar Solitude Subjectivity

His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say to himself with a hint of regret at his hitherto lack of indifference, 'All a dim illusion, was it? Surely it was foolish of me to think any of this had meaning.' He would then spend hours staring at the sky, wondering how best to pass the time if everything—even the sky itself— were for naught. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no best way to pass the time. The only way to deal with the illusion of time was to endure it, knowing full well, all the while, that one was truly enduring nothing at all. Unfortunately for him, this nihilistic resolution to dispassion didn’t suit him very well and he soon became extremely bored. Faced now with the choice between further boredom and further suffering, he impatiently chose the latter, sailing another few weeks along the coast , and then inland, before finally dropping anchor off the shores of the fishing village of Yami.

~ Ashim Shanker

Ashim Shanker Absurdist Fiction Ashim Shanker Bitterness Black Humor Boredom Cosmic Irony Disappointment Dispassion Ennui Gallows Humor Hatred Indifference Infinitude Irony Of Life Love Love And Hate Naught Nihilism Only The Deplorable Passage Of Time Prolonging Life Suffering

He thought of hanging himself, to pass the time.

~ Johnny Rich

Johnny Rich Beckett Boredom Ennui Godot Hanging Samuel Beckett Suicide

I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel used.

~ Marsha Norman

Marsha Norman Boredom Ennui Suicide

Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus and it’s hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy and more than anything in the world you want to get off and the only reason in the world you don’t get off is it’s still fifty blocks from where you’re going? Well, I can get off right now if I want to, because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it’s the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. As soon as I’ve had enough, it’s my stop. I’ve had enough.

~ Marsha Norman

Marsha Norman Boredom Bus Bus Stop Busstations Ennui Suicide

No. You can't. And I can't do anything either, about my life, to change it, make it better, make me feel better about it. Like it better, make it work. But I can stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there's nothing on I want to listen to. It's all I really have that belongs to me and I'm going to say what happens to it. And it's going to stop. And I'm going to stop it. So. Let's just have a good time.

~ Marsha Norman

Marsha Norman Boredom Ennui Suicide

From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.

~ Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham Adventure Boredom England Ennui London Urban Life Urbanism

Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it.

~ John Updike

John Updike 1981 Debauchery Ennui Nelson Angstrom Youth

Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away

~ Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer Boredom Ennui Pin Pins Poems Poetry Pride Sadism Sadist Writing

In a lifeworld, where we can be what we are, and not what people expect us to be, we can escape a blank and void existence, which is linked to wrecking ennui. Boredom often slips into revulsion and nausea, for not being able to find an identity and not succeeding in acquiring individuality with the quality of authenticity. (Like a frozen image)

~ Erik Pevernagie

Erik Pevernagie Acquiring Authenticity Blank Boredome Ennui Escape Existence Expect Frozen Image Individuality Life World Linked People Revulsion Slip Succeeding To Be Void Wrecking

There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.

~ Glen Duncan

Glen Duncan Ennui Existence Prose

It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.

~ Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick Despair Ennui Florida Misery Regret Retirement

She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

~ Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham Desperation Ennui Exciting Life Fantasy Life Life Worth Living Regret Resignation

EnnuiTea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,designing futures where nothing will occur:cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning shewill still predict no perils left to conquer.Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knightfinds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheardof, while blasé princesses indicttilts at terror as downright absurd.The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,while bored arena crowds for once look eager,hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizesshall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.

~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Ennui Poems

How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.

~ Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas Death Despair Dying Ennui Life

Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn't seem like a big deal.

~ Jeff Lindsay

Jeff Lindsay Emotion Ennui Trauma

The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.

~ Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami Ambition Ennui Life

Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the victim of ennui to know one day from another. The opposite of boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.

~ Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell Boredom Ennui Excitement Happiness Pleasure

Some people just live out their whole lives with some sort of ache in their heart they never resolve.

~ Eda J. Vor

Eda J. Vor Ennui Heart Ache Mental Health Mental Health Awareness

In my room, I looked around at all the pieces of my life, neat and tidy on their little shelves, my clothes and books and telephones, my shoes and hair barrettes, and tried to care about them. Mine, mine, mine. But they were only things, things that could have belonged to anyone.

~ Aryn Kyle

Aryn Kyle Consumerism Ennui Materialism

This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

~ David Levithan

David Levithan Ennui Social Media

Oh God, not another fucking beautiful day.

~ James Fox

James Fox Africa British Ennui
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