Irvine Welsh Quotes

Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.).

I am well in body although considerable rumpled up in spirit.

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

There's a million reasons why I should give you up. But the heart wants what it wants.

I thought about the relentless thought-processing, soul-devouring machine that is my brain, and wondered how on earth I was ever going to master it. Then I remembered that line from Jaws and couldn't help smiling: 'We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

Ennui and lethargy are waging a war inside me.

Social life is filled with doubts and vain aspirings; solitude, when the imagination is dethroned, is turned to weariness and ennui.

Things are going round and round in my head--or maybe my head is going round and round in things.

Static in my head, the reflected sound of everything, tried to go to where it led, but it didn't lead to anything.

To be crazy is not necessarily to writhe in snake pits or converse with imaginary gods. It can sometimes be not knowing what to do in the morning.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They're like poems in that respect, suicide notes: nearly everyone tries their hand at them some time, with or without the talent. We all write them in our heads. Usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes.

All our days are marked with/ unexpected/ affronts--some/ disastrous, others/ less so/ but the process is/ wearing and/ continuous./ Attrition rules./ Most give/ way/ leaving/ empty spaces/ where people should/ be.

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed and made everything bend to it.

She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.

Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.

Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

--Why are we fighting them? --They're mad. We're sane. --How do we know? --That we're sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don't they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.