Betty Smith Quotes

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

Sorrow and frustration have their power. The world is moved by people with great discontents. Happiness is a drug. It can make men blind and deaf and insensible to reality. There are times when only sorrow can give to sorrow.

Unhappiness was my god.

Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

When you try to avoid the pain, it creates greater pain.

Fans say I have a lot of sorrow in my eyes. It's true.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

I bleed like nobody else.

My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry.

There's always a part of my brain saying: 'Stop getting comfortable. Don't relax.' Because I find it difficult to write when I'm happy. I have to go out there and get battered up and bruised to write anything. I have to feel something.

Even though I am smiling, I have some suffering in my heart.

Misery is a match that never goes out.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

... pain doesn't listen to reason. It has its own reason, which is not reasonable.

Seeing your parents fall apart is really rough. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

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

And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy. It climbs the same way on damp walls. You are to blame for this cruel sport. They are fleeing from my dark lair. You fill everything, you fill everything. Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy, and they are more used to my sadness than you are. Now I want them to say what I want to say to you to make you hear as I want you to hear me.

When I'm in pain and grief and despair, my throat is clenched and my heart hurts.

There will be no song on our lips if there be no anguish in our hearts.

Art is only a way of expressing pain.

If my life were not a dangerous, painful experiment, if I did not constantly skirt the abyss and feel the void under my feet, my life would have no meaning and I would not have been able to write anything.

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

I looked at my hand resting on the shelf of the prop cabinet, thinking of the scars that were there whether anyone could see them or not.

Is there anything men take more pains about than to render themselves unhappy?