"I accumulate the past, constantly making out of it and casting into it the present, without giving it a chance to exhaust its own duration. To live is to suffer the sorcery of the possible; but when I see in the possible itself the past that is to come, then everything turns into potential bygones, and there is no longer any present, any future. What I discern in each moment is its exhaustion, its death-rattle, and not the transition to the next moment. I generate dead time, wallowing in the asphyxia of becoming."

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Added on April 10, 2026
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Original Language: English

Sources

Emil Cioran, The Fall into Time (1964)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philosophical_pessimism