Steven Brust Quotes

Even the mistakes and the pain that you've caused and enacted upon you. That is definitely what I'm trying to capture

I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman.

As they croak, I see myself in the pistol smoke.

When I say what I'm reading, this is what I need. I know the ills that plague me.

To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting.

If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer.

There are some pains that run too deep for anything to absolve them. The best we can do is pick up the pieces and hope for the strength we need to keep going.

I suffer from a spiritual malaise which manifests itself in outbursts of vicious rage.

Oh, how wretched should I be at this moment, if I had not made my peace with God.

One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.

Maybe I was what Leah thought she was. Some kind of dead end that shouldn’t be passed on to another generation. Or maybe it was just that my life was a big, cruel joke, and there was no escape from the punch line. -Jacob

What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.

He who awaits the call, but sees the need, Already sets his spirit to refuse it.

I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

Your suffering is never caused by the person you're blaming.

Those who inflict must suffer, for they see The work of their own hearts, and this must be Our chastisement or recompense.

Maybe her own tears were the poison that made her grow.

When a man is tired of life on his 21st birthday it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself.

Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

I don't look at myself on the outside. Sometimes you feel like you're not really there and need one more [take], because I feel like something is coming out. I don't really know what but I need to get it out.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.