However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.

- Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel

“Smoke and you will destroy yourself.”

1980s Russian anti-smoking poster

Opthamologist clinic in Taiwan, 1962, Wang Shuangquan

Kaya Rose Scodelario-Davis 

How even for a moment can I dismiss this non-knowledge, a feeling of having lost my way in some underground tunnel? To me this world, the planet, the starry sky, are just a grave (I don’t know if I’m suffocating here, if I’m crying or becoming some kind of incomprehensible sun).

- Georges Bataille, Guilty

"He seemed to get smaller and smaller as the train steadily accelerated. A whistle tore the air again, and a bird flapped its wings and took off from some branch. In no time at all, the train gained speed and vanished. I felt a sudden pang of loss. Motionless, I started into the direction that the train had gone. I railway signal flashed red. I looked up to find wisps of low clouds floating in the blue morning sky. Fresh now unspoiled by footprints coated the front end of the platform. All of it seemed like a scenic description meant to indicate that Takaki was gone. However. I stood there confident that I could take on life. No matter how far he went, he was with me. While I felt a deep sense of loss, I was strangely fullfilled. So I told myself : We will meet again someday, though it won't be soon, and I will try to be a stronger person by then.

But we would never meet again."

Ray K. Metzker, Leapin’ zzz, 1982

I've known supreme happiness, and I'm not greedy enough to want what I have to go on forever. Every dream ends. Wouldn't it be foolish, knowing that nothing lasts forever, to insist that one has a right to do something that does?
[...]but, if eternity existed, it would be this moment.

- Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

Metro station in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1978)

Then I started coming home unhappy.
“What’s the matter, Hank?”
I had to get drunk every night

A Clockwork Orange, French lobby card for the theatrical release, 1972

“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretences of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

- Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden (1899)

Der Einsame im Herbst (The lonely one in autumn), from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde

Ryszard Winiarski, Game for One, 1988