Isaac Watts Quotes

I think hell is something you carry around with you, not somewhere you go.

Shame weighs a lot more than flesh and bone.

The words went round and round and round in my mind and my body, until I knew they were no longer my words but something that had been carved into my heart. And now my soul was crying.

I've never had a person come to me and say, 'I want to take down this person.' They come and say, 'I need help. This thing is killing me. It's weighing me down. It's sitting in the pit of my stomach.'

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

A fretful fancy is constantly flinging its possessor into gratuitous tophets.

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

Guilt isn't always a rational thing, Clio realized. Guilt is a weight that will crush you whether you deserve it or not.

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?

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

The pain of the flesh is naught to that of the heart

..this feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.

I think emotional and mental pain is probably worse than physical pain. I think we don't realize that I have no arms or legs but we all have disabilities of some sort, some fear, some lost, some wishes that didn't come true, things we wish would be better.

Well, you know, there's depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn't just the blues. It's not just like I have a hangover in the weekend ... the girl didn't show up or something like that. It isn't that. It's not really depression, it's a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you're gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit.

She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.

Guilt was its own prison.

My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

I kept thinking how marvellous it would be if I could somehow tear my heart, which felt so heavy, out of my chest.

Despair can be like an iron band constricting the heart.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

The disease of the heart is worse than the disease of the body.

I think that shame is a universal, paralyzing, painful emotion.

Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

[I]t just makes me tired even thinking about it. It reminds me of that feeling I had before I left. Like my lungs were made of lead. Like I can't even think about starting to care about anything. Like I either wish that they were all dead, or I was, because I can't stand the pull of all that history between us. That's before I even pick up the phone. I'm so tired I never want to wake up again. But I've figured out now that it was never them that made me feel that way. It was just me, all along.

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