Alexander Pope Quotes

My position requires my presence but it is so far from my heart.

Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

I can't sleep with you tonight, baby, my head's all messed up, you've no idea. It's somewhere else and it's full of voices and songs and bad things.

Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

The human being is constantly torn from calm and peace of simple existence by two things; wanting what you don't have, or disliking what you have.

Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others. Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often. She was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated disillusions. Then Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and unbounded in some faith, and then she would suffer and be strong in her repression. Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.

Where was it ever promised us that life on this earth can ever be easy, free from conflict and uncertainty, devoid of anguish and wonder and pain? Those who seek the folly of unrelieved 'happiness'-who fear moods, who shun solitude, who do not know the diginity of occasional depression-can find bliss easily enough: in tranquilizing pills, or in senility. The purpose of life is not to be happy.

When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my rusty lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the most devilish pain burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. - Harry Haller

Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.

Sometimes I think it's better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than to just be... safe. At least she knows she's living.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

Remember the pain?' thought Artemis. I hate myself. I really do.

Each substance of a grief has twenty shadows.

Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.

I'm unhappy as Dylan Thomas was, because I'm not, but I've had my brushes with sadness.

If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?”'afterwards than before There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd even bothered.

I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground Upon my flesh t'inflict another wound. Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death With holy Paul; lest it be thought the breath Of discontent; or that these prayers be For weariness of life, not love of thee.

I never felt at peace with anything or anybody.

It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.

Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked.

God pity us indeed, for we are human, And do not always see, The vision when it comes, the shining change, Or, if we see it, do not follow it, Because it is too hard, too strange, too new, Too unbelievable, too difficult, Warring too much with common, easy ways, And now I know this, standing in this light, Who have been half alive these many years, Brooding on my own sorrow, my own pain, Saying "I am a barren bough. Expect, Nor fruit nor blossom from a barren bough."

Sylvia's dark eyes widened. "You are more than you appear to be" "Yes. I am a monster of Darkness, a beast," he agreed with her. Her lips tilted up. "Can a beast weep in sorrow? Does darkness have the capacity to feel loneliness? I think not.