I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal. - Jean-Paul Sartre

Do you regret those days?'
'No,' replied Marcelle acidly: 'but I regret the life I might have had.

I was neither a grandfather, nor a father, nor even a husband. I didn’t vote, I scarcely paid any taxes; I couldn’t lay claim to the rights of a tax-payer, nor to those of an elector, nor even to the humble right to honour which twenty years of obedience confer on an employee. My existence was beginning to cause me serious concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?

All was fullness and all was active, there was no weakness in time, all, even the least perceptible stirring, was made of existence. And all these existents which bustled about this tree came from nowhere and were going nowhere.