E. M. Cioran, a Romanian-born writer known for his essays on philosophy and culture and his emphasis on despair, emptiness and death, died on Tuesday in the Broca Hospital in Paris. He was 84 and had lived in Paris since 1937. Mr. Cioran (pronounced TCHAW-rahn) has been widely read by modern writers and thinkers. Susan Sontag called him a practitioner of "a new kind of philosophizing: personal, aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systematic." And Edmund White, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1991, said that Mr. Cioran "has contemplated suicide for decades, esteems extremists, fanatics and eccentrics of all sorts and has instituted vertigo into his daily life."

“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”

― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair