How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Don Fabrizio had always known that sensation. For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, like itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hourglass. (7.1)
Fabrizio can feel his life slipping away from him with every day he gets older. One of the things that makes this feeling so unsatisfying is how slowly things seem to be slipping away. If it were all over and done with quickly, he could deal with it. But the fall of his social class is something that happens by inches more than all at once.
Quote #8
Sometimes he was surprised that the vital reservoir could still contain anything at all after all those years of loss" (7.3).
Fabrizio has always had what he wanted out of life. But on the other hand, that means he has also had a lot to lose. And lose he has. By the time he's old, he has far less than he started out with, both in terms of relatives and in terms of prestige.
Quote #9
And the pains, the boredom, how long had they been? Useless to try to make himself count those; all of the rest: seventy years. (7.25)
In his 73 years of life, Fabrizio figures that he has spent two or three of them actually living. The rest he's spent submerged in a life of boredom and habit, which is definitely not a recipe for personal fulfillment.