Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.
If I am no longer able to function with you, it is, you understand, due to no lack of virility but because almost everything about you, especially your body, leaves me totally without sensation... I
I reckon even you didn’t know the actual statistics, hiding out until now like you done. But in the three days and nights that your campaign lasted you managed to hasten fifty-five white people into e...
How simultaneously enfeebling and insulting is an empty page! Devoid
But my behavior was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory.
And then I blurted some words that a lifetime of general equilibrium, and a smug belief in the impregnability of my psychic health, had prevented me from believing I could ever utter; I was chilled as...
A lot of the literature available concerning depression is, as I say, breezily optimistic, spreading assurances that nearly all depressive states will be stabilized or reversed if only the suitable an...
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
There is only one way out—up the chimney.’ He
Such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.
You hate men, you’ve hated Daddy for years, and the sad thing is that he hasn’t known it. And the terrible thing is that you hate yourself so much that you just don’t hate men or Daddy but you hate ev...
We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little... scabs, she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. I hate this type of—and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase—unearne...
Poland is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, soul-split country which in many ways (I came to see through Sophie’s eyes and memory that summer, and through my own eyes in later years) resembles or conjures...
Oh, I would say, you’ve never understood me, Harry, that not out of vengeance have I accomplished all my sins but because something has always been close to dying in my soul, and I’ve sinned only in o...
O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles...
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Ché la diritta via era smarrita. In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right...
It was, of course, the memory of Sophie and Nathan's long-ago plunge that set loose this flood [of tears], but it was also a letting go of rage and sorrow for the many others who during these past mon...
If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.’ Then he said, ‘Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.