Emily Dickinson Quotes

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

There's no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it's in a flash or long after you've begged it to stop.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

Despair doth strike as deep a furrow in the brain as mischief or remorse.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.

For a long time that's all I could do, howl and scream and cry like the wild animal of the night that I'd become.

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

When you were straight, evil thoughts and memories came pouring up out of the darkness inside you; buzzing black flies clinging to the insides of your skull.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart

The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.

The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.

She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.

My brain is sending poison to my heart.

We're all haunted in one way or another, are we not? If not by spirits, then by our own demons and regrets.

I have shed pewter tears! It is too melancholy! Rather let me go to the wars and lose arms and legs! It would at least be a change. I cannot bear it longer! Now, I know what it is to have a visit from one's old thoughts, with what they may bring with them! I have had a visit from mine, and you may be sure it is no pleasant thing in the end; I was at last about to jump down from the drawers.

I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Anger causes anguish to the souls of all of those who experience the feeling as well as to those who are the recipients of this emotional explosion.

The various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.

I was oppressed with the sensations I then felt; I sunk under the weight of them.

Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.