[T]ime passed and there was really no romance in life anymore, only the tedious tranquility of marriage without excitement or curiosity, the dull routine of making a comfortable living with nothing to nourish the imagination.

The life of a soldier far from the cannon's roar has little glamour to it.

Venture nothing, and life is less than it should be.

Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

His drinke, the running streame, his cup, the bare
Of his palme cloasde, his bed, the hard cold ground:
To this poore life was Misery ybound.

If the WormCam had shown nothing else, he thought, it was this, with pitiless clarity: that the lives of most humans had been miserable and short, deprived of freedom and joy and comfort, their brief moments in the light reduced to sentences to be endured.

When love wasn’t fun, it was just boring and dull and achy.

And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.

While some no other cause for life can give But a dull habitude to live.

One’s own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

Life doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

I have lived such an unnatural life, devoid of love, sex, and pleasure.

Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.