Sarah Josepha Hale Quotes

Alas, why does my mind have to walk through the dust of the past every day?

The mind wants to forget because it weighs so much on the heart and soul. I am tired of crying and feeling so helpless. I want to breathe again -just for a little while.

The words went round and round and round in my mind and my body, until I knew they were no longer my words but something that had been carved into my heart. And now my soul was crying.

My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.

Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

I'll think about something else. I'll just sit quietly. If I could sit still. If I could sit still, maybe I could read. Oh, all the books are about people who love each other, truly and sweetly. What do they want to write about that for? Don't they know it isn't true? Don't they know it's a lie, it's a God-damned lie? What do they have to tell about that for, when they know how it hurts?

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.

The body knows no pain, not like the soul. At least a nerve has limits, a body part a name. But the soul... the soul... There is no bandage - even crying is in vain.

If you could leave your selfishness, you would see how you've been torturing your soul.

Grief heals ... unshed tears fester like a canker in the soul.

The dull pain of truth weights my soul, pulling it under. I am left hopelessly awake.

The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried ... nothing is so warming and companionable.

AFFLICTION, n. An acclimatizing process preparing the soul for another and bitter world.

If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.

God enabled me to so agonize in prayer that I was quite wet with perspiration, though in the shade and the cool wind. My soul was drawn out very much from the world, for multitudes of souls.

Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations.

All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.

Affliction is a pill, which, being wrapt up in patience and quiet submission, may be easily swallowed; but discontent chews the pill, and so embitters the soul.

We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds. (36)