Jonathan Lethem Quotes

Minds that are ill at ease are agitated by both hope and fear.

I am a man whose mind has been ulcerated with a variety of embarrassments for 30 weary months.

I started having anxiety attacks and panic attacks. I would cry myself to sleep every night and wish I could go back in time and get my life back and be a human again instead of a photo op.

There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.

The mind is ever ingenious in making its own distress.

My brain's gone, my soul's worn and my spirit is torn The rest of my body's still bein operated on.

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

If anyone could look into my head See or feel the dread that has captured Me or see within this sad, unhappy brain They would only turn away Turn away.

Impatience turns an ague into a fever, a fever to the plague, fear into despair, anger into rage, loss into madness, and sorrow to amazement.

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

The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I were pregnant with a rock.

our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable

When Jared smiled, his teeth were stained with fresh scarlet. "Don't you hate me?" he demanded. "I'd hate me." "You just tried to drown yourself," Ash said. "You seem to hate yourself plenty already.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

I feel as if things are falling apart within me, like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.

It is the sweetest spring within the memory of man. So green, so mild, so beautiful! Ah, what a contrast between nature without and my own soul so torn with doubt and terror!

Pain is the mind. It's the mind. It's the thoughts of the mind.

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

You should therefore say: alone in one's boat, alone with one's care, alone with one's despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed.

I cannot endure the horror, the evil, which comes to self in solitude.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.