Whitley Strieber Quotes

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered — now I have only one doubt left — which of the twain was God?

From the wrestling of his own soul with the great enemy, comes that depth and mystery which startles us in Hamlet.

Every soul is a battlefield.

The very thing that drives you, can drive you insane Got a head full of thought crimes and a number with no name Got an eleventh hour Jesus and a mouth full of blame A casket lined with silver dollars and a number with no name.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside.

The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.

Sometimes I feel like I'm possessed with a multitude of demons.

Sometimes you can't see your way out. The "dark night of the soul" - it's a reality for many, many people.

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?

In the day I can smile though I wanna die / Hold on, hold on / I can keep it together for a little while / and be strong, so strong / But when the sun goes down and I'm all alone / I haven't the strength to fight / That's when my tears give in to the night

Thinking about suicide is a potent consolation: it helps us to get through many a bad night.

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

Sometimes I wish I had an easy answer for why I'm depressed.

Personally, I'd have welcomed a dementor attack. A deadly struggle for my soul would have broken the monotony nicely.

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

Only the half-mad are wholly alive.

And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

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.

We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.