Jacques Barzun Quotes

There is a melancholy that stems from greatness.

I sometimes fall into the trap of doing what I think I should be doing rather than what I want to be doing.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

I have moments of darkness, of anger, and moments of rage. They do creep up at the most inopportune times. Not to recognize that in my music would give people a sense of sainthood that I don't necessarily have or even want to have.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

I read 'The Bell Jar' as an adolescent and, like most teenagers, had no problem identifying with a young woman who had everything going for her - looks, talent, opportunity, with her 'whole life ahead of her,' yadda, yadda, yadda - yet was spiraling into misery.

I'm like a race horse attached to a freight wagon.

I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.

I don't kill myself. I can't live like that.

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.

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

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

It's weird, I was such a survivor and so wanted to be a part of life while I was trying to snuff out the life that was inside of me. I had this duality of trying to kill myself with drugs, then eating really good food and exercising and going swimming and trying to be a part of life. I was always going back and forth on some level.

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.

I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.

That guy behind me on the airplane? He's been kicking my seat because he hates me. He's kicking my seat because he hates me and I'm gonna kill him. When we get off this plane, I'm gonna make eye contact. I'm gonna kill that guy. And all of that is just stuff in my head, but it's good to get rid of that stuff.

I should never be left alone with my mind for too long.

I hear voices in my mind and you're worried that you're the freak,” he laughed.

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.

She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.

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.

Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself?

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.