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The Trouble with Being Born
The Trouble with Being Born | E. M. Cioran
18 posts | 8 read | 18 to read
In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, "that laughable accident." In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience. A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someones hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison.The New Yorker In the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."Publishers Weekly "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."Boston Phoenix
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shutupsmalls

Although I have sworn never to sin against blessed concision, I am still in complicity with words, and if I am seduced by silence I dare not enter it, I merely prowl on its peripheries.

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shutupsmalls

A writer has left his mark on us not because we have read him a great deal but because we have thought of him more than is warranted.

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shutupsmalls

It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.

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shutupsmalls

No one has been so convinced as I of the futility of everything; and no one has taken so tragically so many futile things.

Wellreadhead Interesting work 6y
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shutupsmalls

Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don‘t see against whom, against what...

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shutupsmalls

When sleep departs from us, the unheard-of becomes everyday, easy: we enter [Time] without preparations, inhabit it, wallow in it.

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shutupsmalls

Think about those who haven‘t long to live, who know that everything is over and done with, except the time in which the thought of their end unrolls. Deal with that time. Write for gladiators...

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shutupsmalls

There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

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shutupsmalls

I‘d like to pray with dagger-words.

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shutupsmalls

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

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shutupsmalls

After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk. Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?

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shutupsmalls

X insults me. I am about to hit him. Thinking it over, I refrain.
Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; my second one, flabby. What is known as “wisdom” is ultimately only a perpetual “thinking it over,” i.e., non-action as first impulse.

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Boyfriend
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“My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what let‘s me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.”

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Boyfriend
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The first in a stack of antinatalism books I‘ve put together. Sometimes one requires the comfort of knowing that the darkest commentary of their own mind can be put into words.

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Wellreadhead
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#bookblog #newreview
(Link in profile)

Suet624 A fantastic review. 7y
Wellreadhead @Suet624 thank you, I appreciate that 7y
tammysue Great review! 7y
72 likes3 stack adds4 comments
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Wellreadhead
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“It‘s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

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blurb
Wellreadhead
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone

Bklover Welcome to Litsy! 7y
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GoneFishing

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don‘t know where that elsewhere is.

JanuarieTimewalker13 Wow!! I kind of always feel like I have one foot here and one foot in a place in my imagination...like, a smarter, kinder Earth...not a place that drops turkeys out of planes. Really, humans? 8y
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