Anguish

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Must not all things at last be swallowed up in Death?

Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said

 

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary

But what am I?

 

A still small voice spake unto me, “Thou art so full of misery, Were it not better not to be?”

 

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.

We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.

No matter how hard you fight the darkness, every light casts a shadow, and the closer you get to the light, the darker that shadow becomes.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucketof whitewash and a long-handled brush. Hesurveyed the fence, and all gladness left himand a deep melancholy settled down upon hisspirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feethigh. Life to him seemed hollow, and existencebut a burden.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual’s own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

 

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?