Distress Quote by Edward St. Aubyn

“Why was he here? Why was he always, always, always around? Didn’t he have a life? Didn’t he have anything better to do?”

— Diana Peterfreund

“Why was he there?   How”

— Heidi Kreider

“Being an adult, it seemed, was horrible. But being a child was awful too, and moving from one state to the other only meant…

— Alison Espach

“His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it…

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Perhaps because of this, he felt he always knew who and what he was, which is why, as he moved farther and then further…

— Hanya Yanagihara

“The big question was, what all was this society up to? They’d certainly been in and out of his office, as well as accidently…

— Kirsten Fullmer

“He had been stricken with horror, not so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how, and…

— Leo Tolstoy

“Everywhere he looked was a nut, and it was all a sensible young gentleman like himself could do to maintain his perspective amid so…

— Joseph Heller

“It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and…

— Paul Auster

“He'd never asked for an exciting life. What he really liked, what he sought on every occasion, was boredom. The trouble was that boredom…

— Terry Pratchett

“He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.”

— Adam Haslett

“How could anyone endure such a state, of having someone there and not there—not there and there—at the same time?”

— Hiromi Kawakami