From Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:

I happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and I have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost.  As a person who finds himself in such a position, I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing that those in the midst of its maelstrom realize.  The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment – perhaps only a matter of seconds.  Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance.  One may have to live the rest of one’s life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse.  In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything.  All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.