Edward Dahlberg Quotes

We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined.

It's a brooding melancholy that haunts me.

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

'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.

I always said all my life if I wasn't born and they gave me the question I'd say I don't want to be born.

Sadness was something I was thinking about in my life outside of writing, so it wormed itself into whatever I wrote.

I was very good at my work and I wasn't real good at my life.

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead.

I remember one day sitting at the pool and suddenly the tears were streaming down my cheeks. Why was I so unhappy? I had success. I had security. But it wasn't enough. I was exploding inside.

Why was I feeling this way? Why was everything so bad in my life? I had no answers to these questions.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.

Unhappiness was my god.

And that wreched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation: 'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!' " - 'Joy of Life

I am sick of this way of life. The weariness and sadness of old age make it intolerable. I have walked with death in hand, and death's own hand is warmer than my own. I don't wish to live any longer.

Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.

For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none.

My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeinga Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.

There's something tragic in the fate of almost every person--it's just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.

How can we be scrupulous In a life which, from birth onwards, is so determined To wring us dry of any serenity at all?

She could not trust herself to hope—but without hope, she realized, she had no reason to go on.

I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.

What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.