Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno

When you are actually thinking of dying you have other things to do then than think about death. His whole being was concentrated on the effort to get his breath. (51)

Those who have not experienced it are inclined to think marriage more important than it really is. The mate you choose renews, for better or worse, her own race in your children, but Mother Nature, who ordains it thus, and yet cannot lead us straight to the goal (because when we get married it is not of our children we are thinking), persuades us that our wife will bring about our renewel--a curious illusion the facts in no way support. (57)

I had a considerable degree of culture owing to my having studied at the university; and still more owing to my long, and I think very instructive period of doing nothing. (58)

...he had the habit of shouting in order to think more clearly. (63)

In my dreams I made her more beautiful too, pysically. I have run after a good many women in the course of my life and succeeded in winning a fair number of them. In my dreams I possessed them all. I do not of course make them more beautiful by actually altering their features, but I do as an artist friend of mine, a very subtle painter, who when he is painting the portrait of a beautiful woman calls up vividly to his mind some other exquisite object, like fine porcelain for instance. It is a dangerous proceeding, for it is not only confined to dreams, and the lady continues in real life to keep something of the fruit, the flower, or the porcelain with which you adorned her. (76)

I approached her not in order to win her, but with the direct intention of marrying her, which is an unusual way for love to take; a wide and comfortable way perhaps, but it does not lead to the goal, though very near it. Love approached in this way lacks its chief characteristic: the subjection of the female. (77)

I think we all have delicate spots in our conscience as we do in our bodies, which we keep covered and prefer not to think about. (80)