Lydia Davis Quotes

They are looking in utter darkness for that which has no existence whatsoever.

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

This wretched brain gave way, and I became a wreck at random driven, without one glimpse of reason or heaven.

When all else fails there's always delusion.

My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.

I won the argument against the knife that night, but barely. I had some other good ideas around that time--about how jumping off a building or blowing my brains out with a gun might stop the suffering. but something about spending a night with a knife in my hand did it. The next morning I called my friend Susan as the sun came up, begged her to help me. I don't think a woman in the whole history of my family had ever done that before, had ever sat in the middle of the road like that and said, in the middle of her life, "I cannot walk another step further--somebody has to help me.

A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.

Despair is the only cure for illusion.

My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.

The Hollywood sirens are shrieking, while down some search lit alley runs some lost belief.

He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Frankly, goin' crazy was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't say it's for everybody; some people couldn't cope.

There's no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn't even a tunnel. The best thing I can do is get drunk and listen to classical music. Or sleep and wait for death to get closer. Leaving this will not be a horrible thing. Yet I'm glad, somehow, that I threw my words in the air: confetti, celebrating nothing.

You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.

Even the brightest magnesium flare can do little against such dark except blind the eyes of the one holding it. Thus one craves what by seeing one has in fact not seen.

The most wretched have yet hope.

The situation is hopeless, we must take the next step.

In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

When [disease] can't be stopped, that's where we become lost.

I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I've known in life I don't know what I'd do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.

I knew I was in trouble, but I thought I was in hell.