Lester Bangs Quotes

I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

Well, you know, there's depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn't just the blues. It's not just like I have a hangover in the weekend ... the girl didn't show up or something like that. It isn't that. It's not really depression, it's a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you're gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit.

Not for nothing does the neurotic suffer - but not for anything very much, either.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.

I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

Pain - physical, emotional and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed or "fixed." Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret.

Not treasured wealth, nor the consul's lictor, can dispel the mind's bitter conflicts and the cares that flit, like bats, about your fretted roofs.

Most self-laceration is more noisy than painful.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.

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.

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

I never will have peace of mind. I'm not constructed that way. Some things in life can be horrible.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.