Jessamyn West Quotes

What a strange distance there is between ill people and well ones.

As a child or young adult going through an illness, it can be stressful at times and boring and extremely alienating.

Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.

Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

If originally it was not good for a man to be alone, it is much worse for a sick man to be so; he thinks too much of his distemper, and magnifies it.

Boy, you gotta be real sick to get this much attention.

There are some sick people in this world.

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

A man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy.

Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery.

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all - most of us, anyway - want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering an image of death.

I've always been an outsider to some extent.

I feel like I'm in my own world: in the world but not a part of it.

I took the test for AIDS. I began to hate people who were not sick. Those people are monsters, I would think, believing that they are well because of moral superiority, because they are good. I identified with the loneliness of the sick. I felt that there was something pure about them.

There's nothing more raw in life than when you're sick.

If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him.

I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.

Everything you do makes my body scream with loneliness.

How do you feel?” she asked, trying to fluff his pillow. “Other than terrible, I mean.” He moved his head slightly to the side. It seemed to be a sickly interpretation of a shrug. “Of course you’re feeling terrible,” she clarified, “but is there any change? More terrible? Less terrible?” He made no response. “The same amount of terrible?

I stood among them, but not of them: in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.