"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." 

Charles Dickens - David Copperfield

“Unprovided with original learning, uninformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved - to write a book.” - Edward Gibbon in Memoirs of My Life

"The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it." 

- Cormac McCarthy The Crossing

"And so May fifth could have been any day - until just before midnight, when Margo Roth Spiegelman slid open my screenless bedroom window for the first time since telling me to close it nine years before."

- John Green, Paper Towns

“The cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.”

- Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cites

"I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole life-time; you know it is extreme old age."  

Fydor Dostoyevsky - Notes from the Underground

"If there had been a door within reach that led straight to death, he wouldn't have hesitated to push it open, without a second thought, as if it were just a part of ordinary life."

Haurki Murakami - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage