Quotes About Suffering

You must have been traumatized beyond fucking belief

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain itself, the depressed person hoped at least to be able to express something of its context, its shape and texture, as it were-by recounting circumstances related to its etiology.

something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes.

LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.

La verdad es lo que te hará libre. Pero no hasta que haya acabado contigo.

having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.

The drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning tehy have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for this is 'analysis paralysis.' ... That other people can often see things about you that you yourself canno see, even if those people are stupid ... That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.

He cranks the condo's AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you're dreading whatever you think of.

David Foster Wallace

I'm awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.

Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency —sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying— are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

Existence and life break people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time.

then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the pain of the mounting Losses, and of course you're in Denial about it being the Substance that's causing the very Losses it's consoling you about -

I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. I'm pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I'm not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.

It's unvarying and kind of spirit-killing for a Staffer to watch, that the only way your addict ever learns anything is the hard way. It has to happen to them to like upset the idolatry.

daily visual reminder of the depths drink sunk him to, so Mrs. O. had gone around with her nose bent over flat against her left cheek—Bud O.'d tagged her with a left cross—until U.H.I.D. referred her to Al-Anon, which

She would- never mind. She was his servant. Slave mentality. This was not the girl I asked to marry me. She was his slave and believed she knew only joy...where was my wife? What was this creature she stroked and sucked at...

You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock beneath your feet. You fall; you blow here and there. How does one say: "tragically, unvoluntarily, lost.

the feeling that you'd do absolutely anything or say or trade anything to persuade him to simply settle for rape and let you go, or even torture, even willing to bring to the bargaining table a bit of nonlethal torture if only he'd settle for hurting you and choose to drive off and leave you hurt and breathing in the weeds and sobbing at the sky and traumatized beyond all recovery instead of as nothing

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace