"When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
- Samuel Johnson, 1777

Monotony

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom: absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this or die like this without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”

—

Anaïs Nin

“They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.”

—	Daniel Handler, Adverbs

“Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself — as it will seem to do—
With ‘I have saved this afternoon for you’…”

—	T. S. Eliot, from “Portrait of a Lady”

Drowning

“When sadness was the sea, you were the one that taught me to swim.”

—	Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This For You