Erik Larson Quotes

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

Life is wasted on the living.

I wanted to understand pain and the human condition, which is full of pain and regret and sadness - and some happiness, if you're lucky.

I hate to think life is just facts and laws.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery

Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)

Everything is sorrow for the wise.

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.

Misery is the River of the World

People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.

The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.

For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

I hear my father-in-law's response..."Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.

I have learned that in a long life we all eventually play the part of the betrayed, and we all eventually play the part of the betrayer, and neither is pleasant because both roles involve pain, inflicting or absorbing it.

What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die--and everything will end. You will die and learn everything--or stop asking.