there is no big lie. the universe is indifferent.

“What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. [...] But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.”
— Albert Camus, The Stranger [transl. Matthew Ward]

“Preacher was talkin’ there’s a sermon he gave
He said every man’s conscience is vile and depraved
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it’s you who must keep it satisfied.”
— Bob Dylan, ‘The Man in the Long Black Coat’

“Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways; one can be deceived in believing what is untrue, but on the other hand, one is also deceived in not believing what is true; one can be deceived by appearances, but one one can also be deceived by the superficiality of shrewdness, by the flattering conceit which is absolutely certain that it cannot be deceived. Which deception is more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of him who who does not see or of him who sees and still does not see? Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to waken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love [transl. Howard and Edna Hong]

"If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose."
— Charles Bukowski

"You've seen that man before
his golden arm dispatching cards
but now it's rusted from the elbows to the finger
And he wants to trade the game he plays for shelter
Yes he wants to trade the game he knows for shelter."
— Leonard Cohen, 'The Stranger Song'

“[W]hat do men not corrupt every day? There is nothing so innocent that men cannot turn it to crime; nothing so beneficial that its values cannot be reversed; nothing so good in itself that it cannot be put to bad uses.”
— Molière, preface to Tartuffe [trans. Richard Wilbur]

“Hell hath no limits nor is circumscribed
In one self place, but where we are is hell.
And where hell is there must we ever be.”
— Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

“She was not convinced. I might have known. I smell her off you, she kept saying. There was no answer to this. So I took her in my arms and swore I could not live without her. I meant it, what is more. Yes, I am sure I did. She did repulse me.”
— Samuel Beckett, Play

"I always know. Or part of me does. That's the trouble."
— Eugene O'Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten

“Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us — or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.”
— Geoffrey Hill, ‘Funeral Music’

“Forgetfulness is not just a vis inertia […] but it is rather an active ability to suppress, positive in the strongest sense of the word […] To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and battle with which our underworld of serviceable organs work with and against each other.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality [transl. Carol Diethe]

“[H]e stopped me and wanted to know how I pictured this other life. Then I shouted at him, ‘One where I can remember this life!’”
— Albert Camus, The Stranger [transl. Matthew Ward]

“Per me si va ne la citta dolente,
Per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.”
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno