Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. Never in any other time, or any other civilization, have people thought so much or so contantly about aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks always in the same direction). This weighing up of pleasure and pain, which everyone is forced to make sooner or later, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide. . Michel Houellebecq
Some Similar Quotes
  1. A book is a suicide postponed. - Emil M. Cioran

  2. July 24, 6:03 A.M.The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff... Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for wanting to live. - Markus Zusak

  3. How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father? - Ruth Ozeki

  4. The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night. - Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. Everything...affects everything - Jay Asher

More Quotes By Michel Houellebecq
  1. The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

  2. Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.

  3. An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would...

  4. Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.

  5. People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things — even tragedy — with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you;...

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