Leo Rosten Quotes

I'd like a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know. It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing. You break your neck simply living.

When things get unbearable, I wrap myself into a tight ball and shut my eyes. Every muscle in my body is tense. I open my eyes and I'm still where I was when I closed them to escape. Nothing's changed.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

For death is not the worst, but when one wants to die and is not able even to have that.

A reprisal of this magnitude... has never been carried out before. I paced back and forth in my room perplexed and completely depressed, feeling helpless.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die.

If I cry, it's because I'm very angry and I can't do anything about it because I've run into a dead end. That's when the tears would come down.

I have no mouth, and I must scream.

If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.

I know I'm going to blow one day. My life is doomed the way it is. I have no future.

I'd like to do things to make money to save myself but right now I can't do nothing. If they want to put me in jail, they can do that. It's kind of tough.

I felt like things could never get any worse.

The Cardinal is at his wit's end - it is true that he had not far to go.

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

My job is discouraging in the extreme—it often tempts me to quit the helm in despair.

Powerlessness frustrates; absolute powerlessness frustrates absolutely. Absolute frustration is a dangerous emotion to run a world with.

Oh! Most miserable wretch that I am! Why have I not learnt how to swim?

It is sad when people can't connect, and the sense of desperation that you feel when there is nothing to look forward to.

I could not forbear getting up to the top of a little mountain, and looking out to sea, in hopes of seeing a ship : then fancy that, at a vast distance, I spied a sail, please myself with the hopes of it, and, after looking steadily, till I was almost blind, lose it quite, and sit down and weep like a child, and thus increase my misery by my folly.

We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it

Most of the world was mad. And the part that wasn't mad was angry. And the part that wasn't mad or angry was just stupid. I had no chance. I had no choice. Just hang on and wait for the end. It was hard work. It was the hardest work imaginable.

I can no longer face life, so I've decided to go through the rest of it backwards.

But nothing seems to do any good.