Camille Claudel Quotes

Want is misery.

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

I have no mouth, and I must scream.

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

Not having a roof over your head at night must be frightening, cold, lonely and depressing. To be seriously ill as well must be beyond upsetting.

And one thing to be remembered: it is not that the people who are poor, starving, become frustrated with life - no. They cannot become frustrated. They have not lived yet - how can they be frustrated? They have hopes. A poor man always has hopes that something is going to happen - if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; if not in this life then in the next life.

Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!

Whenever you see want or misery or degradation in this world about you, then be sure either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error.

I know that my life is going to be hell from here on.

My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.

I've seen the hell these people go through.

Whatever hardships there have been in my life I still live in a very privileged position. Fear is not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Fear is seeing a child get hurt. Fear is watching someone you love waste away. Fear is knowing you are going to die yourself. But there's no fear in what I do. I write books.

The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at the bottom of the abyss. I learnt of the harshness of the world and its impartiality to human failure.

Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.

One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet.

Poverty makes you sad as well as wise.

I think quite often a fate worse than death is life, for lots of people.

Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place.

I had a very comfortable life, but there were people who spent their life in prison, whose families were destroyed.

Now you watch the parades and processions of hopeful and despairing people walking outside your tomb. They are all looking for the answer to the problem you know so well.

In Hanover Park they highlighted the terrible plight of backyard dwellers and the fact that year after year nothing has been done to help you: the hope and despair you all live with every day.

To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

Right now, they feel they have lost their voice, and their miseries have increased since my departure.