We all have times that we get off center.
I'm really quite bipolar, and the depressed times, when everything felt like night, sometimes you get to such a low point that you physically beat at it until it bleeds - as you would say - bleeds till sunshine.
To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.
It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.
Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.
Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.
By retaliating our sufferings on the heads of those we love, we get rid of a present uneasiness and incur lasting remorse. With the accomplishment of our revenge our fondness returns; so that we feel the injury we have done them, even more than they do.
You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.
Sometimes in New York, you're walking down the street and you realize there's a girl walking in front of you whose thighs you could hit a golf ball through, and maybe that makes you depressed.
After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
There is no birth of consciousness without pain.
No one can make me cry Make me laugh Make me smile Or drive me mad like she does
When a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.
You wish for something, you've wanted it for years, and you're sure you want it, as long as you know you can't have it. But if all at once it looks as though your wish might come true, you suddenly find yourself wishing you had never wished for any such thing.
For in the voyage of the heart, there is a freight of hatred, and the wind of wrath blows shrill.
I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.
What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.
Mama - Mama - I want so many things... I want so many things that they are driving me kind of crazy.
I can tell it all in song: pathos, gladness, love, joy, unhappiness.
Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.
'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill.
I hate, and yet must love the thing I hate.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat
