" She gathered the little cards together with an automatic hand. That was the phrase that came to her, as if her hand were purely mechanical, not alive at all, as if the messages from her skin and her nerves were changes in the anbaric current along a copper wire, not anything conscious. With that vision of her body as something dead and mechanical came a sense of listless desolation. She felt not only as if she were dead now, but that she’d always been dead, and had only dreamed of being alive, and that there was no life in the dream either: it was only the meaningless and indifferent jostling of particles in her brain, and nothing more.
But that little chain of ideas provoked a spasm of reaction, and she thought, No! That’s a lie! That’s slander! I don’t believe it!
Except that she did believe it, just then, and it was killing her. "

― Philip Pullman , The Secret Commonwealth (The Book of Dust, #2)