John Donne Quotes

In the country of pain we are each alone.

Hell is not in torture; Hell is in an empty heart.

It's not fair to show someone the sun and then banish him from it. Even the devil may cry when he looks around hell and realizes that he's there alone. -Acheron

It was the closest to purgatory that I've ever experienced while I've been living.

My entire soul is a cry, and all my work is a commentary on that cry.

The nature of anguish is translated into different forms.

… cast into a burning hell

Nobody knows the pain I've been through.

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.

Everything you do makes my body scream with loneliness.

Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.

This world that I live in is empty and cold/the loneliness cuts me and tortures my soul.

Nothing remained but loneliness and grief.

The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.

You should therefore say: alone in one's boat, alone with one's care, alone with one's despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed.

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

When we focus on our pain, our ache deepens.

I've seen the hell these people go through.

I think Hell exists on Earth. It's a psychological state, or it can be a physical state. People who have severe mental illness are in Hell. People who have lost a loved one are in Hell. I think there are all kinds of different hells. It's not a place you go to after you die.

There is no love without suffering.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

Too much self-centered attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centered attitude is the source of suffering.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

All of my books come from pain.