Djuna Barnes Quotes

What a miserable world!--trouble if we love, and trouble if we do not love.

The more unhappy you are, the more miserable you are, the more you're going to suffer.

He sounded absolutely miserable. “Are you ever going to speak to me?

I am malicious because I am miserable

Whenever we condemn, we cloak the world in pain.

Misery is a communicable disease.

Yes, I have made a woman cry.

I found out when I was 18 that Dad had left my mother and the family before he realised he was ill and then died. When I asked Mum about it, she just sort of shrugged it off and said she'd thought I knew about it all along. Of course I hadn't, though I'm sure she must have been desperately unhappy at the time.

We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP.

I feel hurt and pain times a million, all the time.

Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.

Some things are better left buried and forgotten.

I have nothing to make me miserable," she said, getting calmer; "but can you understand that everything has become hateful, loathsome, coarse to me, and I myself most of all? You can't imagine what loathsome thoughts I have about everything." "Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?" asked Dolly, smiling. "The most utterly loathsome and coarse; I can't tell you. It's not unhappiness, or low spirits, but much worse. As though everything that was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing was left but the most loathsome.

My misery is reaching epidemic proportions.

It is fear that is the greatest cause of misery in the world.

He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

Wickedness frames the engines of her own torment. She is a wonderful artisan of a miserable life.

A sigh is an amplifier for people who suffer in silence.

The wretched reflect either too much or too little.

Misery is wasted on the miserable.

Misery generates hate.

I was tired of secrets, tired of seeing things I was not supposed to see. And so I just cried.

Will holding a secret in your heart make it any less true? If you never tell, never speak of it, will it become only a dream, less than a dream, a nightmare half-remembered? Oh, if only the gods would be so good. (Catelyn)

If through practice of insight you develop a sense of ease, then time has no relevance. If you're miserable, time does matter. It's so unbearable, so enormous you want to get out of it as soon as possible.