“Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long.”

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Letter (1811-05-31) referring to the Peninsular War [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Source: The Light Fantastic

Source: Simple Food for the Good Life (1980), Ch. 4

Part One, chapter 2, page 12
1990s, Why Government Doesn't Work (1996)

Young India (8 April 1926)
1920s

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable. Euclid's world is very simple, and Einstein's world is very difficult — but it is no longer possible to return to Euclid. No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary: most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death.
The same disease often afflicts artists and writers: they sink into satiated slumber in forms once invented and twice perfected. And they lack the strength to wound themselves, to cease loving what they once loved, to leave their old, familiar apartments filled with the scent of laurel leaves and walk away into the open field, to start anew.
Of course, to wound oneself is difficult, even dangerous. But for those who are alive, living today as yesterday and yesterday as today is still more difficult.