Within the heart of every individual lies a fundamental and primordial fear that sometimes manifests as the fear of life and other times as the fear of death.

I'm looking for me in you, that my hollowness makes it impossible to identify my needs and my desires

It is strange and also correct that intense emotions make us respond to earth-shattering news contrary to what logic dictates. They are the absolute value of human emotions; sometimes, happy events...

There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated...

If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression — maybe that's what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch.

Stephen had just come from a class discussion in which several students believed that the right cup of herbal tea would save them from pain and sorrow. Well acquainted with pain and sorrow, Stephen...

They yearn for what they fear for.

Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talk show host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this....

It is the madness produced by the absence of a longing without return, the weariness left by accomplished facts, the pain, in short, that promotes the interruption of all accustomed movement, the...

The more flowery a person's speech … the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed.

Mama's voice was surprisingly calm and caring. As you can imagine, this worried the girl a great deal. She'd have preferred to hear them arguing. Whispering adults hardly inspired confidence.

The very act of looking down on others made people more confident.

If you see yourself as the kind of person who owns Apple computers, or who drives hybrids, or who smokes Camels, you've been branded. And once a person is branded, that person will defend the brand by...

Kayleigh was right. Without the pills, you really do feel nothing. And nothing can be nice.

When you're a child you never figure a grownup is going to be jealous of. It's the grownups who seem to have everything. Children give adults far too much credit.

Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state

The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than...

He felt that now over his every word, his every deed, there was a judge, a judgment, which was dearer to him than the judgments of all the people in the world. He spoke now, and along with his words...

The Brothers Karamazov is a joyful book.

In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer...

The whole article, quite a long and verbose one, was written with the sole purpose of self - display. One could simply read it between the lines: "Pay attention to me, look at how I was in those...

Is this what is called remorse of conscience or repentance? I do not know, and I cannot tell to this day. Perhaps this remembrance even now contains something pleasurable for my passions. No - - what...

Being in love doesn't mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her.

I did not understand that she was hiding her feelings under irony, that this is usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively...

And the passion with which we loved the Lord was a measure of how deeply we feared and distrusted and, in the end, hated almost all strangers, always, and avoided and despised ourselves.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling so tenaciously to their hatreds is that they feel, once hatred has disappeared, they will be confronted with pain.

Tell me... is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark? Think... of the men who have kneled before you while you...

It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached.

Slavery, January understood now as he never had before, made you fear change almost more than anything else.