A garland of quotations LVIII

Culled from the finest adrenaline junkies in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday

Who may disporte them diversly,
Finde never tedious day,
And ease may have varietie,
As well as action may.
•Samuel Daniel “Ulysses and the Siren” (1605).

On the 8th a large house-fly was seen. This interesting event spread cheerfulness through our residence and formed a topic of conversation for the rest of the day.
•John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819–20–21–22 (1824).

He was like someone in love for the first time: he felt capable of performing great heroic deeds but not the daily chore of boring, petty work.
•Hesse, Beneath the Wheel (1906).

The only thing I was learning was that boredom can hurt like physical pain, like wearing an iron hat, like sandpaper clothes, like being crushed under a big stone.
•Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin (1998).

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
•Larkin, “Dockery and Son” (1964).

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.
•Cioran, The Trouble with being Born (1973).

Hence life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.
•Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818-1844).

                                        As Atlas groan’d
The world beneath, we groan beneath an hour.
•Young, Night Thoughts (1742).

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ’Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life—(and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped.)
•Woolf, Orlando (1928).

The historian dies of sheer boredom:
On the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
•Nabokov, “On Rulers” (1944).

It is a rainy day and one is feeling bored. To pass the time, one starts looking through some old papers. And then one comes across the letters of a man one used to love.
Last year’s paper fan. A night with a clear moon.
•Sei Shonagon, “Things That Arouse a Fond Memory of the Past” #4–6 (1003).

Sources: Larkin: Collected Poems (Noonday, 1993); Cioran: op. cit.; Nabokov: Poems and Problems (McGraw-Hill, 1971); Sei Shonagon: trans. Ivan Morris, Pillow Book (Columbia UP, 1991); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.