Lyman Abbott Quotes

From the wrestling of his own soul with the great enemy, comes that depth and mystery which startles us in Hamlet.

I remember feeling, 'If you do not leave now, you won't leave with your soul intact.'

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn't fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.

The very thing that drives you, can drive you insane Got a head full of thought crimes and a number with no name Got an eleventh hour Jesus and a mouth full of blame A casket lined with silver dollars and a number with no name.

Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by – not because she had no future but because she had no past.

All is going well, very well, I couldn’t ask for anything better— So why do I hate my life?

The dimensions of my feelings are too violent.

Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had. I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance?

Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it.

Should I pursue a path so twisted? Should I crawl defeated and gifted?

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

I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.

That strange, twisted, torn love. That conflict between what your heart knows is right and what your mind is told is right.

Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.

All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.

Clearly, I'm drawn to characters with inner conflicts.

I became conflicted in my late teens.

I've always been at war with myself, for right or wrong.

No matter how I look, the freak inside me leaks out.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.