John Berryman Quotes

I don't think the world is a particularly pleasant place.

I never loved the world around me as it was.

Oh, cold world -- I have grown so weary of you and all your horrible bathrooms.

The world itself makes us sick of the world.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

As the world is weary of me so am I of it.

She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

I never wanted this kind of life that Im still living.

What a miserable thing life is: you're living in clover, only the clover isn't good enough.

Doesn't anyone here think this sounds like a vision of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be time for sex or music or books? Stop the world, I want to get off.

I'd never been content in America.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

I was standing onstage last year, and I felt like I wanted to be somewhere else. No matter how many people were out there, it all just felt like a blank sheet of paper.

I feel like sometimes that I was not meant for this society.

The only thing I learn on a daily basis from law school is that I disliked it and the law so much that it's constantly this fire at my heels.

If I could get my membership fee back, I'd resign from the human race.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

How does one get bored of life?

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

After you get what you want you don't want it.

People are hurting, and they feel very disengaged and disenfranchised.

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?