Stephen Dobyns Quotes

I feel like I've been shut in a closet, and he's on the other side, and he doesn't have the key to unlock the door.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance.

For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.

Loneliness is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.

Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

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.

Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.

I bleed like nobody else.

There was no reality to pain when it left one, thought while it held one fast all other realities failed.

Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery.

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I have shed many tears of pain and indignation.

Grief, for me, is a moment-to-moment experience.

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

One of the most painful aspects of suffering is the loneliness of it. Others may offer support or empathy, but no one can walk the road to Moriah in our place.

There is no dignity like the dignity of a soul in agony.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

All by yourself, unable to express the pain of your distress with your deeper inside. You alienate yourself and everybody else.

The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.

...but the truth is that I don't feel like I can carry anyone but myself right now. The streets are empty. I am empty. Or, no--I am full of pain. It's my life that's empty.