Pain and Despair

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

Apt words have pow’r to swage The tumors of a troubled mind, And are as balm to fester’d wounds.

Sleep not, dream not; this bright day Will not, cannot last for aye; Bliss like thine is bought by years Dark with torment and with tears.

 

Thoughts are tyrants that return again and again to torment us.

 

No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

 

He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back. He thought they were old friends.

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.

Keep your bones in good motion, kid, and quietly consume and digest what is necessary. I think it is not so much important to build a literary thing as it is not to hurt things. I think it is important to be quiet and in love with park benches; solve whole areas of pain by walking across a rug .

That was a time when only the dead could smile.

One day beside some flowers near his nose He will be thinking, When will I look at it? And pain, still in the middle distance, will reply At what? and he will know it’s gone, O where! and begin to tremble and cry. He will begin to cry as a child cries Whose puppy is mangled under a screaming wheel.

You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk of death.

How had I come to be here like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn’t?

When I consider how my light is spent,

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Love is a universal migraine.

It costs me never a stab nor squirm

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher.

There are no clear paths. Only pitfalls and tripwires and darkness.

 

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed… here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

What a thrill— My thumb instead of an onion.

Brooding on God, I may become a man. Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

Man is the cruelest animal," says Zarathustra. "When gazing at tragedies, bull-fights, crucifixations he hath hitherto felt happier than at any other time on Earth. And when he invented Hell...lo, Hell was his Heaven on Earth"; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.