#misery

You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history. ↗

— Albert Camus

#happiness #history #misery #death

Love is responsible for nearly every kind of insanity in the world though greed, vanity, and pure meanness contribute their portion to general misery. ↗

— P.N. Elrod

#insanity #life #love #meanness #misery

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"] ↗

— William Matthews

#poetry #teenagers #experience

The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#experiences #loneliness #misery #experience

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had. ↗

— Raymond Carver

#life #misery #funny

One morning, about four o'clock, I was driving my car just about as fast as I could. I thought, 'Why am I out on the highway this time of night?' I was miserable, and it all came to me: 'I'm falling in love with somebody I have no right to fall in love with. I can't fall in love with this man, but it's just like a ring of fire. ↗

— June Carter Cash

#falling-in-love #love #misery #love

Some days when my face was broken out just a little too much for me to take, and I looked in despair at the way my fashionless clothes hung on my thin body, my heart just couldn't take another noticeless passage through my school day and I went to agonize alone in the park. ↗

— Calpernia Addams

#transgender #love

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#misery #poverty #poverty