Saint Augustine Quotes

As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get.

Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!

Acting has always been a way for me to express the emotions I had buried. If I hadn't acted, I would have gone insane. In my acting class, I could let out my real tears and everyone thought it was the character. But no, it was me.

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.

Them pains, when blues pains grab you, you'll sing the blues right.

It's usually a big kind of vent of frustration or anger or sadness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write. It's such a cliche to say that artists write when they're down, but it's true for me. It's a relief to get out what's eating away at my heart or my soul or my head.

Acting is wonderful therapy for people. Instead of suffering for yourself, someone will do it for you.

When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy, we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting.

I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.

Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.

Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery.

I always imagined music trapped inside my clarinet, not trapped inside of me. But what if music is what escapes when a heart breaks?

To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.

I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much . . . because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.

who has not experienced, at some time or other, that words had all the relief of tears?

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one.

Out of my own great woe I make my little songs.

Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it.

I start crying when certain things come up, certain memories, certain feelings, and it's intense. But I think it's good for me - and therapeutic.

I cry to let everything out