Emily Dickinson Quotes

The waves of pain that had only lapped at me before now reared high up and washed over my head, pulling me under. I did not resurface.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

It is difficult to ever think about your loved one having suffered.

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

Some say love, it is a razor that leaves your soul to bleed.

All I can do is lie here, brain turning somersaults. It's nights like these when memories stir, whipping themselves into stiff peaks of pain.

Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.

Let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

There is no grief like heartbreak.

Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it 'cannot be remembered'; itself, being a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in its own chaos.

Strictly speaking, there is but one real evil: I mean acute pain. All other complaints are so considerably diminished by time that it is plain the grief is owing to our passion, since the sensation of it vanishes when that is over.

At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain.

My chest hurts...It hurts. The sound of his name is like a knife in my heart.

When you think of love do you think of pain?

To be more precise it was the color of heartache.

Call me a sinner, Mock me maliciously: I was your insomnia, I was your grief.

There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.

The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation... ...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.

Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange, Vivre est un mal. Once our heart has been harvested once, Life becomes miserable.

I never meant it," he was saying. "Never meant it to happen. Can't stand it, seeing her suffer. Must do something, do something... What do I do? What can I do...?

There whil'st the world prov'd prodigal of breath, the headless trunks lay prostrated in heaps; this field of funerals sacred unto death, did paint out horror in most hideous shapes: whil'st men unhors'd, horses unmast'red, stray'd, some call'd on those whom they most dearly lov'd, some rag'd, some groan'd, some sigh'd, roar'd, promis'd, pray'd, as blows, falls, faintness, pain, hope, anguish mov'd.

My mind was bursting with depression and anguish. I muttered imprecations and murmuring as I passed along. I was full of loathing and abhorrence of life, and all that life carries in its train.

And then another letter had come from Christopher, so devastating that Amelia wondered how mere scratches of ink on paper could rip someone's soul to shreds. She had wondered how she could feel so much pain and still survive.