Alfred Brendel Quotes

Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.

I find writing the darker side, writing tragedy, a lot easier than writing happiness. Happiness is just less psychologically compelling, isn't it?

I think one of the scariest things about depression is that it exists along with the happiness and the joy, and it kind of plays with it and sucks the color from it.

I felt for my crime a just terror; I looked on my life with hate, and my passion with horror.

My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

There were moments when I hated everybody I came across, innocent or guilty, and looked at them as thieves who were robbing me of my life with impunity. The most unbearable misfortune is when you yourself become unjust, malignant, vile; you realize it, you even reproach yourself - but you just can't help it.

Do you know how much thinking and feeling I’ve done? It’s terrible. And nothing’s come of it.

I sighed. "What is life but fleeting moments of happiness strung together on necklace of despair?

Each reaching and aspiration is an instinct with which all nature consists and cöoperates, and therefore it is not in vain. But alas! each relaxing and desperation is an instinct too. To be active, well, happy, implies courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.

I'm really happy with my life now, but there's a lot of stuff I feel very sad about in ways I can't even control.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

I think a lot about the poems I wasn't able to write...I masturbrated...Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy for too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic power...Happiness and poverty can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterword either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.

Sometimes I feel as though there are two me's, one coasting directly on top of the other: the superficial me, who nods when she's supposed to nod and says what she's supposed to say, and some other, deeper part, the part that worries and dreams... Most of the time they move along in sync and I hardly notice the split, but sometimes it feels as though I'm two whole different people and I could rip apart at any second.

Everyone just screams and screams and screams. I have accepted it as real now, but it still feels surreal.

The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Guilt is a timorous thing ere perpetration; despair alone makes guilty men be bold.

He froze as the scent of her hair met him. It was touching his cheek,tickling him. I cant afford this, he thought, but he didnt move, watching her finger trace the new line. "He cracked my mirror,"she said, clearly angry.

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.

Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up! his mind demanded of him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation. Different segments of the organism called John Terrance Kelly knew different parts of the whole story, but somehow they'd never all come together, leaving the separate fragments of what had ...once been a tough, smart, decisive and to blunder about in confusion - and despair! There was a happy thought.

Can calm despair and wild unrest Be tenants of a single breast, Or sorrow such a changeling be?

I want that. I want that awful intense and serious unhappiness, cos then I might feel better, and then I might be happy.

It's so easy to wish for death when nothing's wrong with you! It's so easy to fall in love with death, and I've been all my life, and seen it's most faithful worshippers crumble in the end, screaming just to live, as if all the dark veils and the lillies and the smell of candles, and grandiose promises of the grave meant nothing. I knew that. But I always wished I was dead. It was a way to go on living

To be feared is to fear. No one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind.