Harry > Harry's Quotes

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“A strange calmness had overcome her with her realization that she no longer cared. A tension inside her head had been released, an enigmatic, ticking mechanism had ceased to operate, and now she floated in the pool of circumstances that had drowned her desires, was held fast in it, like scum on the surface of a pond.”
― John Franklin Bardin, Devil Take the Blue-tail Fly

“A feeling of sorrow began to rise up inside Teresa, but was stopped before it became painful. Sometimes she thought she could see the medication working in her body. What she saw was a chainsaw; the blade shot out and sheared off the top and bottom of her emotional register. The crown and the roots., Leaving her with a bare trunk to drag around.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist

“Something gets dirty. A towel. Then it gets dirtier. And even dirtier, so dirty that it begins to fall apart. It is trampled in the mud, picked up, rolled into a ball. There is a breaking point in the state of dirtiness where the object that is dirty ceases to be itself. It becomes something else. The towel no longer looks like a towel, it cannot be used as a towel, it is not a towel. the same thing applies to a human being. Oh, the capacity for reflection might get in the way, the capacity to miss what that person once was. Human, detergent-scented, usable.
But it disappears, very gradually. It disappears.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Little Star

“I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I thought I cannot bear this world a moment longer.
Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe