D. H. Lawrence Quotes

The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.

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.

Everyone hits bottom their own way.

It's been one of the most painful things I've ever been through in my whole life: trying to understand the degree to which behaviors that I thought were totally appropriate were destructive.

I believe that literature always goes precisely there where the damage to a person has been done.

I don't think any one relationship in my life has wrecked me. I think I am a collection of wrecks.

Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars.

A knife, it felt like a knife, and I'd discovered that despite everything that's happened, I still had an endless untapped potential for getting hurt.

I don't think you're human unless you go through some [self-destructi on].

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.

She had won the battle against her memories. But one form of torture remained, untouched by the years, the torture of the word "why?

When a man is hit by Friendly Fire, his blood pressure lowers and his morale sinks. I have been hit by Friendly Fire in my heart. Sighs spill from my body instead of blood.

To know one's self, one must go all the way to horror.

It doesn’t matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now.

This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

Some wounds cut us so deep that they stop us. Stop us from letting go, from growing up, from seeing the truth.

If you stop your creative process every time you think you need to cheer yourself up, or rid yourself of emotional conflicts, your life will be over before you can create anything of any real significance.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

Self-inflicted misery smirks under its crown of thorns.

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.