Roland Barthes Quotes

Physical suffering apart, not a single sorrow exists that can touch us except through our thoughts.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.

I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

The root of the problem I have is anxiety, and it's all derived from something - I'm just going to say it, some kind of sadness. It manifests in so many different ways and it affects people differently.

I think cruelty is just loneliness disguised as bitterness.

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

Grief can choke you. It’s dangerous, something else you have to beat.

I much condole with you on your late loss... pains and diseases of the mind are only cured by Forgetfulness;--Reason but skins the wound, which is perpetually liable to fester again.

I think emotional and mental pain is probably worse than physical pain. I think we don't realize that I have no arms or legs but we all have disabilities of some sort, some fear, some lost, some wishes that didn't come true, things we wish would be better.

Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care... -Wintergirls

I thought that jealousy was an idea. It isn't. It's a pain. But I didn't feel as they do in a Broadway melodrama. I didn't want to kill anybody. I just wanted to die.

Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory

Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

Grief,she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead (suicide note)

My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image.