Alan Jay Lerner Quotes

One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.

For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.

The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

There is no sorrow except in captivity.

You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.

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 would paint a portrait which would bring the tears, had I canvas for it, and the scene should be -- solitude, and the figures -- solitude -- and the lights and shades, each a solitude.

When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.

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.

Physical suffering apart, not a single sorrow exists that can touch us except through our thoughts.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

Oh, Cathy! Oh, my life! how can I bear it?" was the first sentence he uttered, in a tone that did not seek to disguise his despair. And now he stared at her so earnestly that I thought the very intensity of his gaze would bring tears into his eyes; but they burned with anguish: they did not melt.

My heart is empty & my life has no value anymore. Each moment a thousand tears.

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

There was the gate next, which she(Liesel)clung to. A gang of tears trudged from her eyes as she held on and refused to go inside. People started to gather on the street, until Rosa Hubermann swore at them, after which they reversed back whence they came. ~A TRANSLATION OF ROSA HUBERMANN’S ANNOUNCEMENT~ ‘What are you arseholes looking at?

I am now a man of despair, rejected, abandoned, shut up in this iron cage from which there is no escape.

Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.

There's no grand excellence to it. In my experience it was just almost the gulaggy boringness of it that'll kill you. You're just in this murk. And you're with other humans, but you lose all your human skills and it's just like you're in this plastic bag and you can't quite connect with people. You lose your ability to transmit electricity or something, and to receive it.

I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

I woke up and one of us was crying.

Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?

One by one, drops fell from her eyes like they were on an assembly line - gather, fall, slide...gather, fall, slide...each one commemorating something she had lost. Hope. Faith. Confidence. Pride. Security. Trust. Independence. Joy. Beauty. Freedom. Innocence.

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.