Bernard Beckett Quotes

I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.

She's lonely and wounded and very vulnerable and it really is a story about people at the heart of it all.

My friends freaked out when I posted 'I'll Never Be Able To Love' on Facebook.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me.

I've certainly felt alone a lot of my life.

Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.

I lay in bed at night crying to myself. The only one who loved me and watched over me was someone I couldn't see or hear or touch.

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

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 love feeling loved. I don't love knowing that I will always come in second place. I love the fact that at least sometimes when I am in my home, I'm not alone. I don't love the fact that it's not always. I love not having to answer to him. I don't love that he doesn't answer to me. I love the way I feel when I am with him. I don't love the way I feel when I'm not.

I don’t count life as life without love

Because I have been lonely, I value love.

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

I guess that's why they call it the blues, time on my hands could be time spent with you.

I am sick of this way of life. The weariness and sadness of old age make it intolerable. I have walked with death in hand, and death's own hand is warmer than my own. I don't wish to live any longer.

Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

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.

I hold my face in my two hands. No, I am not crying. I hold my face in my two hands to keep the loneliness warm - two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving me in anger.

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.

That’s what love’s all about. You’re the only one having those wonderful feelings, but you have to go it alone as you wander through the dark your mind and body have to bear it all. All by yourself.

Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.

You have no idea what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better of me.

Be near me when my light is low... And all the wheels of being slow.

When we are no longer capable of love, we are no longer alive.