Alexander Lowen Quotes

But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.

When you commit your life to something and it doesn't work out, it is a tough place to be. Suicide can be the spiritual reprieve of a faithless person. I knew I could always just end it, and there was solace in that.

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me. Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can't do it. Can't live in the same universe with that.

Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.

I don't know as I am fit for anything and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone.... Sometimes I could not sleep and have groaned and cried till midnight.

Despair exaggerates not only our misery but also our weakness.

The various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

She could not trust herself to hope—but without hope, she realized, she had no reason to go on.

An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else

People cannot endure inexplicable worthlessness

He was suffering from the loss of an illusion.

If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.

Stuart must have sensed my despair from the way I began lightly banging my forehead on the table.

And the thought of that makes me want to open a vein, experience pain, know I'm alive, despite this living death.

Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.

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

I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.

Not being happy really is my fear.

I want you to take away the hope because that's the thing that's killing me.

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead.