Walter Gropius Quotes

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently against your persecutors.

Life will not break your heart. It'll crush it.

They'll take everything, even your tears.

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

People die because they find living too painful.

In ten years of struggle and travail that beggar description, in ten years of suffering almost beyond human endurance, we have witnessed the indifference with which all Europe and even our brothers of the north have remained but passive spectators to our anguish.

It’s not that the actual suffering is so great—though it’s bad enough—but the men seem such big helpless children, and the women so impersonal—little Atlases under a load they know will crush them out at last, but it doesn’t matter. They aren’t conscious any more than their hearts are conscious of their endless business of beating. They have no conscious life, no windows. It makes me ill.

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage.

My music comes from heartbreak - from feeling what it's like to lose everything and not being able to express it through words because it doesn't make sense.

No one alive is more tormented nor weaker than myself.

Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn't crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.'' -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Sometimes...you can cry until there's nothing wet in you. You can scream and curse to where your throat rebels and ruptures. You can pray, all you want, to whatever god you think will listen. And, still it makes no difference. It goes on, with no sign as to when it might release you. And you know that if it ever did relent...it would not be because it cared.

I have spent my life falling. Not the kind that Tiny's talking about. He's talking about love. I'm talking about life. In my kind of falling, there's no landing. There's only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you're falling, it's the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.

I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

What are they going to do to me that they haven't done already? They took away my entire past. They took away my entire future. What's left for them to take?

I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.

I've seen the hell these people go through.

Suicide doesn't solve your problems. It only makes them infinitely, un-countably worse.

For death is not the worst, but when one wants to die and is not able even to have that.

If you have ever been in a real tragic or sad situation, the words that come out are hopelessly inadequate and kind of cliched.

The pain of powerlessness is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the earth school, and everyone shares it.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.