From Nabokov's Speak Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tell us that our existence is but a brief crak of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). (19)

I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was non other than the pure element of time. One shared it--just as excited bathers share shining sea water--with creatures that were not oneself that were joined to one by time's common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. (21-22)

I would moreover submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known. (25)

...as if the singular were to thin to bear the load of her love.. (28)

...the sad (but interesting, I thought) necessity of blowing up tyrants... (29)

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. (36)

Tolstoy II:

"The first condition of an author's popularity, [writes T. in his diary], i.e., the way to make himself loved, is the love with which he treats all his characters. That is why Dickens' characters are the friends of all mankind; they serve as a bond between humanity in America and in Petersburg; but Thackeray and Gogol, though faithful to life and artistic, are pitiless and not at all loving."

...the schoolboy efforts of his peasant pupils taught him the fundemental truth that the need to enjoy and serve art was inherent in every human being, and this need had its right and should be satisfied. (234)

Tolstoy, as formerly, made his [diary] an impartial history of events and an inventory of his thoughts and feelings; Sonya, by her own admission, took to her diary when things went wrong, when she felt the need of seeking relief by pouring out her dissatisfactions and sorrow in its pages. The result is that her diary more frequently presents a dark, one-sided picture of her existence. (280)

Leo Tolstoy

Its professors [at the University of Kazan, where Tolstoy studied Jurisprudence] were mostly crotchety German pedants who mangled the Russian language and achieved that pitiful kind of academic individualism acquired by practicing all manners of eccentricities.

...no genius ever violated self-made rules of conduct with more regularity than Tolstoy. (68)

The most significant aspect of this unhappy Moscow visit was the birth of the creative artist. Tolstoy began to observe closely the life around him and to experience an irresistable urge to describe it on paper. At the fashionable balls and dinner he attended no detail escaped him. He would sit at the window of his bacheleor apartment and watch all the unfolding comedy and tragedy of street life. A policeman strolled by and the observer wondered who he was and what kind of existence he led. A carriage drove past the window and he asked himself who was in it and what the rider was thinking. The house across the street served as a starting point for a guessing game about its inhabitants and all the intimate details of their inner lives. What an interesting book, he imagined could written about such people. (78)

Traveling together is like living together. If the enforced intimacy fails to breed contempt, it makes  travelers inordinately sensitive to each other's slightest fault. (82)

Tolstoy's point was that these men were being hypocritical when they flaunted their convictions. Convictions were invented by the intelligentsia so that they would have something to talk about. (143)

Wallace Stevens:

The honey of heaven may or may not come,
But that of earth both comes and goes at once.
---------------
The walker in the moonlight walked alone,
And in his heart his disbelief lay cold.
---------------
And apt in versatile motion, touch and sound
To make the body covetous in desire
Of the still finer, more implacable chords.
---------------
The pillars are prostate, the arches are hag-
gard
The hotel is boarded and bare.
Yet the panorama of despair
Cannot be the speciality
Of this ecstatic air.
---------------
A little different from reality:
The difference that we make in what we see.
----------------
Under the white clouds piled and piled
Like gathered-up forgetfulness,
In sleeping air.
----------------
...not balances that we achieve but balances that happen
As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.

Other things:

Oserons-nous donc dire que cet avantage de la raison, de quoi nous faisons tant de fete, et pour le respect duquel nous nous tenons maitres et empereurs du rest des creatures, ait ete mis en nous pour notre tourment?
--Montaigne (48)

Men are children. They must be pardoned for everything, except malice.
--Joseph Joubert

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)

Somehow, it’s easy to forget that life is a gloomy trial for a lot of people; on a related theme, it’s hard to conceive a more lugubrious subject than suicide—the extra-medical option the doldrums tends to suggest now and then (or often)--but this author, with a nice sense of calm and humor, and without getting the least bit sleezily therapeutic (here's to you, Dr. Phil), makes a considered case for sticking it out. (Note: I’m not myself tempted to join the suicide-club, even though it would help me get out of tomorrow’s exams.)

http://harpers.org/blog/2013/06/on-suicide/

Also, this poem by WS (not that one, the other) which I don't find in my hardback edition of his collected stuff:

No soldiers in the scenery,
No thoughts of people now dead,
As they were fifty years ago,
Young and living in a live air,
Young and walking in the sunshine,
Bending in blue dresses to touch something,
Today the mind is not part of the weather.

Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.

 --“A Clear Day and No Memories,” Wallace Stevens

A first sampling of Barbara Pym, from her novel Excellent Women:

I had observed that men usually did not do things unless they liked doing them. (9) 

But it was a women’s program and they all seemed so married and splendid, their lives so full and yet so well organized, that I felt more than usually spinsterish and useless.  (28)

Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.  (44) 

Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with no one to watch one’s struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite someone eating spaghetti? (96)

I told myself that, after all, life is like that for most of us—the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction. (101)