Geoff Dyer Quotes

You, sleeping on your bed of nails. Weeping an ocean beyond the pale. Strange, sorrow is your greatest skill. You're suffering from overkill... Choose whether to laugh or to cry. Menace and promise mingle in your eye. Wait, it's only a matter of time. You know everything will be fine... Rain falls down and the seas run high. When you're by my side we can rise above it. Let me dry all the tears inside. On your way you cannot hide from the howling wind and the roaring tide. You might get hurt but your fears will subside when you at last escape from the tears inside.

This Cruel Age has deflected me.

I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.

Happiness is a bull's-eye, awaiting arrows of pain.

I think about giving up. I almost do.

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

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.

It was really a pleasure to play someone who's literally pushed past her breaking point repeatedly.

I'm not a pitiable creature. It's just that I suffer very eloquently.

Where the mind is past hope, the heart is past shame.

Living, it's awful for me.

If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie.

Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on?... I don't know the answer, I know only that I can't.

How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?

There are those who suffer and grow strong; there are those who suffer and grow weak. This mystery of pain is still for me the saddest of earth's disabilities.

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

This iron world bungs down the stoutest hearts to lowest state; for misery doth bravest minds abate.

Life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.

We’ve died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.

I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.

The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.