Quotes About Suffering

I've had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can't quite make out what it is. It takes time.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.

people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.

life itself is not the miracle. that pain should be so constant, that's the miracle -

there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate.

mercy, I think, doesn't the human race know anything about mercy?

the psyche has been burned and left us senseless, the world has been darker than lights-out in a closet full of hungry bats, and the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on

pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more.

I am not like other people. I am burning in hell. the hell of myself.

To ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you: something else is hurting you—that's why you need pot, or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think. Or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. Or Vietnam or Israel or the fear of spiders.

Fay had a spot of blood on the left side of her mouth and I took a wet cloth and wiped it off. Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.

No wonder Van Gogh blasted his head off. Crows and sunlight. Idle zero. Zero eating your guts like an animal inside, letting you shit and fuck and blink your eyes, but nothing, a nothing.

There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer.

as the shadows assume shapes I fight the slow retreat now my once-promise dwindling dwindling now lighting new cigarettes pouring more drinks it has been a beautiful fight still is.

Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire…. Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.

They have no idea that it can be done by a bus driver, a field hand, or a fry cook. They have no idea where it comes from. It comes from pain, damnation and impossibility. The blow to the soul of the gut. It comes from getting burned and seared and slugged. It comes from...new and awful places and the same old places.

agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

our sins are manufactured in heaven to create our own hell.

Everything is so sweetly awful, so continuously sweetly awful: the art of consummation: life eating life.

I had no Freedom. I had nothing.

I went home each night dizzy and sick. He was murdering me with the sound of his voice.

I once lay in a white hospital for the dying and the dying self, where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die, where on my knees I prayed for LIGHT, I prayed for l*i*g*h*t, and praying crawled like a blind slug into the web where threads of wind stuck against my mind and I died of pity for Man, for myself, on a cross without nails, watching in fear as the pig belches in his sty, farts, blinks and eats.