“This world’s been too many for me.”
Mr. Tulliver, in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss.
“Et j’ai grand peur à tout moment De voir mourir d’épuisement L’ami d’enfance, Que pour moins de solennité J’appelle ici le Chat Botté, Mais qu’on nomme aussi l’espérance.” André Gill.
“Tu veux choisir ta mort; Va sache bien mourir sans crainte niaise: La lâcheté, c’est le travail sans pain, Le suicide lent des ruines et des fournaises. Ne tremble pas, sois fort, de ton dédain, Et fais grève à la vie, enfant sans pain!” Francis Vielé-Griffin.
“I have an education.
“‘Now you are armed for the battle,’ said my professor, in bidding me adieu. ‘Who triumphs at college enters victorious into la carrière’ [career].
“What carrière?
A former classmate of my father’s, who was passing through Nantes and stopped off to see him, told him that one of their fellow-classmates, he who had won all the prizes, had been found dead—mangled and bloody—at the bottom of a carrière [quarry] of stone, into which he had cast himself after having been three days without food.
It is not into this ‘carrière’ I must enter, I take it,—at least, not head first.”—Jules Vallès, in Jacques Vingtras—Le Bachelier.
“First came the silent gazers; next, A screen of glass we’re thankful for; Last, the sight’s self, the sermon’s text, The three men who did most abhor Their life in Paris yesterday, So killed themselves: and now, enthroned Each on his copper couch, they lay Fronting me, waiting to be owned. I thought, and think, their sin’s atoned.” Robert Browning.