Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.

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

He did not know which was more painful, the waking or the sleeping. When he slept, he dreamed: dark disturbing dreams of blood and broken promises. When he woke, there was nothing to do but think, and his waking thoughts were worse than nightmares.

Not treasured wealth, nor the consul's lictor, can dispel the mind's bitter conflicts and the cares that flit, like bats, about your fretted roofs.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of he making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either.

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.

It is clear to me that one of the biggest obstacles we face as human beings is the pain we put ourselves through when we resist and wrestle with our emotions.

It's curious how we act in moments of personal despair.

How I hated the dark part of me that continually foretold of failure or futility.

There is a dark place calling to me, but I will not go just yet. I know I can't return from it.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

I am well in body although considerable rumpled up in spirit.

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred.

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.

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.

Maybe we all have a dark place inside of us, a place where dark thoughts and darker dreams live, but it doesn't have to become who we are.

A discordant mind, black with confusion and despair, would finish me off as thoroughly as the cold.